The Monday after Thanksgiving is one of the busiest online shopping days of the year as everyone returns to work and gets online.

But according to a study conducted by IBM, which analyzed data from more than 500 leading U.S. retailers, mobile is playing a larger role in consumers’ shopping habits, especially around the holidays.

The study found that traffic to retail sites from mobile devices is expected to more than double this month from last season, reaching 15 percent of all visits to retail sites. Last year on Cyber Monday, mobile visits totaled only 3.9 percent.

Of course, mobile is benefiting from the overall trend toward shopping online instead of shopping at the mall. A comScore report released earlier this week found that e-commerce spending was up 13 percent in the third quarter, compared to the same quarter a year earlier, to $36.3 billion.

But in particular, the IBM study says it’s also increasing because of smartphone and iPad penetration. Last month, iPad conversion rates reached 6.8 percent compared to the 3.6 percent conversion rate found for all mobile devices as a category.

This year, the statistics will be supported even more by more iPad sales. A year ago, the iPad was only eight months old. Separately, next week Amazon will be shipping its own tablet, the Kindle Fire, to consumers. If there’s a tablet that’s good for shopping, I’d bet Amazon would make it.

Other findings from the IBM study:

• In October, 10.7 percent of people who logged on to a retailer’s site used a mobile device, up from the 4.2 percent recorded in the same month in 2010.
• Additionally, mobile sales are growing, reaching a high of 9.6 percent in October 2011, up from 3.4 percent in October 2010.
• Social commerce is not seeing as much growth. Facebook accounted for 77 percent of all traffic from social sites, but only 9.2 percent of consumers who visited a retailer site from a social site made a purchase.

In a study conducted by SuperData Research on behalf of Viximo, a social games and applications platform, it found that non-Facebook social gaming will explode to $5.6 billion in 2014, up from an estimated $3.2 billion this year.

At that level, the study found that it will represent 65 percent of the overall projected revenue, including both Facebook and non-Facebook social gaming networks, which together are expected to hit $8.6 billion in 2014.

Most of the non-Facebook revenue will be driven by international markets, where Facebook is not dominant, including Asia, Russia, Brazil and Turkey.

Some of the social networks include Hyves in the Netherlands; Tuenti in Spain; StudiVZ, a student-focused site in Germany; and Badoo, a dating site in the U.K. The study does not take into account the entrance of Google into the industry with its games network on Google+.

Other findings:

• Asia is the largest market for social games, with an estimated $2 billion in total revenue for 2011.
• Russia and Brazil also have large social gaming audiences, with 35 million and 32.6 million people, respectively.
• Germany’s social gaming revenue is expected to increase to $250 million in 2014, up from $173 million in 2011.

Instead it finds that social games have begun to eat away at time and money spent on traditional games in the console market.

The report was commissioned by Kabam, the Redwood City, Calif.-based start-up that has ballooned to more than 400 employees after raising millions of dollars in venture capital.

Founded in 2006, Kabam has released some of the first hardcore titles for Facebook, including Kingdoms of Camelot and Glory of Rome. More recently, it released Edgeworld and has plans for a game based on the movie “The Godfather.” Essentially, it is in the company’s DNA to go after the traditional game companies, like Electronic Arts or Activision as opposed to going after casual games made by Zynga.

Maybe it is old news at this point that the console environment should be concerned about social gaming. After all, Zynga has managed to get 268 million monthly active users on the platform.

But the company has found some interesting data that supports its theory that all gamers — even the ones who enjoy the bloodiest or most complicated of story plots — will become so-called social gamers.

(But don’t worry, the data also backs up that for now the “casual” social game market is still dominated by females aged 30 and over.)

Even more to the point, it believes hardcore social gamers, who are defined as those who play action or role-playing games on Facebook, will end up the more lucrative portion of the market, even if they are outnumbered by the general population, because of their propensity to play more games and more often.

Some of its findings: 

• 41 percent of all Internet users in the U.S., or roughly 98 million poeple, are playing social games.
• Hardcore social gamers, of which 82 percent play console games, tend to play a larger number of social games for a longer period of time than casual social gamers.
• About 24 percent of hardcore social gamers report that they’ve decreased the amount of time they are playing on other platforms.
• About 22 percent have decreased the amount of money they’ve spent.
• 78 percent of hardcore social gamers are playing two or more social games and 47 percent are playing three or more.
• 30 percent of hardcore gamers play social games for more than an hour per day.

The report was conducted by Information Solutions Group and was based on the results of an online survey completed by 1,412 people in April and May. To qualify, participants had to live in the U.S. and have played games on a computer, game console, mobile phone, handheld game player, tablet or social network in the past year. UPDATE: A link to the research can be found here.

Thanks to portable devices, like smartphones and tablets, and games on Facebook, men and women alike are squeezing a few minutes of game play into their daily lives, which is actually leading to more social interactions in and out of the living room.

Or at least that’s the conclusion of a new study released this week by Latitude, a research and consulting firm that counts DirecTV, Yahoo, Food Network, ESPN and other major media companies as clients.

The report, which studied 290 smartphone owners, examined the future of gaming and tried to illustrate the portrait of the “new gamer.”

This is not an economic forecast. There are no hockey stick graphs here. Rather, this is a touchy-feely explanation for why more people are gaming than ever before. As a result, it might as well have included a chart that pointed up and to the right, and named companies, like Apple, Zynga or Angry Birds’s Rovio, as major benefactors.

Read the report here, watch a video here, or better yet, take a look at this infographic (click to enlarge).

Photo Credit: Mario Spann.

According to a new study, Web browsing can actually refresh tired workers and enhance their productivity, compared to other activities such as making personal calls, texts or emails, let alone working straight through with no rest at all.

The study, “Impact of Cyberloafing on Psychological Engagement,” by Don J.Q. Chen and Vivien K.G. Lim of the National University of Singapore, was presented last week in San Antonio, Texas, at the annual meeting of the Academy of Management, an association of management scholars.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Tonight, Demand Media–in reaction to a new study showing that its flagship eHow site had now gotten much more negatively impacted by Google’s rejiggering of its search algorithm than previously–released a statement and blog post about the tempest.

In it, the Santa Monica, Calif.-based company reaffirmed its outlook for fiscal year 2011, noting, in part:

“Certain third parties that have published reports attempting to estimate the effect of recent search engine algorithm changes made by Google on traffic to the Company’s owned and operated websites have significantly overstated the negative impact of those changes on traffic to eHow.com, as compared to the Company’s directly measured internal data.”

The company, though, declined to give specific details about the impact of Google’s attempt to clean up its search results by tweaking its algorithms to cut out poorly made material from so-called “content farms.”

While others had apparently been initially impacted by Google’s first foray, such as Yahoo’s Associated Content unit, Demand had not been.

That is, until a recent Sistrix poll (see chart below), showing eHow has now been hurt badly by even more Google search changes, codenamed Panda.

While acknowledging a decline in search traffic on eHow from the Google changes, Demand said the Sistrix data was way off.

In a blog post, Larry Fitzgibbon, Demand’s EVP of Media and Operations, wrote, in part:

“However, recent third-party reports attempting to estimate the impact to our search driven traffic, including one projecting a 2/3rds decline in eHow.com traffic, are so significantly overstated that we decided to comment.”

When Google began making changes to its search formula, Demand CEO Richard Rosenblatt told MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka in an interview that its relationship with Google was all sunshine and roses.

When asked how its relationship with Google was, Rosenblatt said:

“This is why our partnership with Google makes sense. 1) We help them fill the gaps in their index, where they don’t have quality content. 2) We’re the largest supplier of all video to YouTube, over two billion views and 3) we’re a large AdSense partner. So our relationship is synergistic, and it’s a great partnership. And it’s a partnership that we’re excited to continue to expand.”

It will be interesting to see how he feels now.

Here are both Demand’s official press release and blog below:

Demand Media Reaffirms Outlook for Fiscal Year 2011

SANTA MONICA, Calif., Apr 18, 2011 (BUSINESS WIRE)

Demand Media, Inc. (NYSE: DMD), a leading content and social media company, announced today that it is reaffirming its financial outlook for fiscal year 2011 that it previously provided on February 22, 2011.

Certain third parties that have published reports attempting to estimate the effect of recent search engine algorithm changes made by Google on traffic to the Company’s owned and operated websites have significantly overstated the negative impact of those changes on traffic to eHow.com, as compared to the Company’s directly measured internal data. Recent search engine algorithm changes have negatively impacted search driven traffic to some of our websites, including eHow.com, resulting in moderately lower year-to-date page view growth for the Company’s owned and operated Content & Media properties compared to page view growth rates before the algorithm changes. Nevertheless, the Company currently expects that its year-over-year page view growth across its owned and operated Content & Media properties in the second quarter of 2011 will be comparable to, or greater than, the year-over-year page view growth achieved in the second quarter of 2010.

As previously announced, the Company will report its first quarter 2011 financial results on May 5, 2011. The Company will host a conference call to discuss the results at 5:00 p.m. Eastern Time (2:00 p.m. Pacific Time). A live webcast of the conference call will also be available and can be accessed within the investor relations section of Demand Media’s corporate website at ir.demandmedia.com.

Another Statement About Search Engine Algorithm Changes

Posted by larry fitzgibbon at 4/17/2011 10:05 PM PDT

It’s hard to imagine a company more focused on the connection between consumers and content than Demand Media. That point of connection gives us the opportunity to inform, engage and serve the consumer. And it’s where trusted relationships start. So, how our content reaches the consumer–whether it’s through direct visits, social media referrals, apps or search–continues to be top of mind with everyone at the company. Consumers are connecting with more content than ever before as social media and mobile access have emerged to play huge roles that didn’t even exist just a few years ago. And search engines, of course, continue to play an integral part in content discovery and have been hard at work improving their products to create the best consumer experiences possible.

As I discussed on my last blog post, Google recently made significant search algorithm changes in an update dubbed Panda that has rolled out in various capacities from late February thru mid-April. With respect to Panda’s mid-April update, some of our properties saw Google search referrals move up while other properties, including our largest property eHow.com, saw these referrals go down.

As I said in my prior post, we generally do not comment or speculate on changes by major search engines, as these changes can happen nearly daily. However, recent third-party reports attempting to estimate the impact to our search driven traffic, including one projecting a 2/3rds decline in eHow.com traffic, are so significantly overstated that we decided to comment. As discussed in our press release issued today, we currently expect that in Q2 2011 our owned and operated Content & Media properties will generate year-over-year page view growth comparable to or greater than the year-over-year page view growth reported for Q2 2010. We have also reaffirmed our calendar year 2011 financial guidance in this press release.

Demand Media has a myriad of impactful sites and many sources of traffic. We are encouraged that the investments we’ve been making in site experience and content quality are making an impact with our consumers. Organic growth in visits from non-search sources to eHow continue to grow rapidly and Cracked.com is now the most visited humor site on the Internet with the majority of its page views coming from direct visits. Improvements have been registered from eHow’s recent redesign and the introduction of new video series leading to significant growth in Facebook likes. Our brand advertisers have also reported encouraging results with their intent-targeted campaigns. Rest assured, just as we have been innovators in building one of the largest online audiences, we are applying that same rigor and intensity to delivering a quality experience for consumers and advertisers.

As a disruptive digital media and technology company, we have been operating in a fast moving environment since the company’s founding five years ago. While change is frequent, one thing is certain–Demand Media is steadfast in our commitment to produce great outcomes for our consumers, advertisers and community of creative professionals. We’re in the trenches listening, learning, adapting and innovating–and we are very excited about the opportunity in front of us. We look forward to providing details on all of these topics and more in our previously announced conference call at 5:00pm (Eastern) May 5th, 2011 to discuss first quarter 2011 financial results.

Larry Fitzgibbon is Demand Media’s EVP of Media and Operations, and manages the company’s rapidly growing network of consumer properties.

Today the the CTIA, the wireless industry trade organization, got behind the president’s plan in a big way, and suggested that the proposed spectrum auctions could bring in billions of dollars more than the president said. Using data from 13 prior spectrum auctions as a model, the organization today released the findings of a study conducted in partnership with the Consumer Electronics Association saying that an auction of 120 MHz worth of spectrum could produce revenue in the range of $36 billion to $48 billion.

The study also found that only in the top 30 markets in the continental United States will TV stations actually have to exit certain spectrum ranges to clear up sufficient spectrum for wireless broadband. In most cases, TV broadcasters will probably be satisfied with incentive auctions that give them some portion of the proceeds raised from the auctions. In a few cases it will be trickier, and the study suggests a few options like channel-sharing and repacking. Broadcasters outside the top 30 markets should not have to give up any spectrum, the study says.

The point of the study, CTIA president Steve Largent told me, is to help nudge Congress toward passing a law that will allow the Federal Communications Commission to hold incentive auctions that can help spur TV broadcasters who currently have the licenses for the spectrum. So far, broadcasters have signaled that they’re not yet entirely willing to go along with this plan. “We think this can be relatively painless for the broadcasters, but it’s still going to take a lot of work at Congress and at the FCC to get it done,” Largent said.

That the wireless industry would be getting behind Obama’s plan is no surprise given their exploding spectrum needs for data services, so there is a bit of a grain-of-salt element to the study’s findings. However it’s also a solid signal that the wireless carriers are willing to bring serious cash to bear for spectrum, which is, generally speaking, good news for all concerned.

Broadcasters are understandably taking a cautious line. In a statement issued last week in response to Obama’s speech in Michigan, Dennis Wharton, executive vice president of the National Association of Broadcasters said, “Let’s not forget that broadcasters returned more than a quarter of TV station spectrum to the government less than two years ago, and that much of that spectrum has not yet been deployed. NAB is not against the President’s plan. We will work to ensure that incentive auctions remain truly voluntary, and that broadcasters who don’t volunteer to return spectrum–and the millions of viewers that we serve–are held harmless.”

The company asked 500 people at 300 companies, many of them large companies with 10,000 or more employees, about the benefits they were seeing from using social business software, which in this case is Jive, naturally, though an independent firm did the survey itself.

Some of the results were a little vague. For instance, respondents reported a 39 percent increase in “employee connectedness.” Others were more concrete: Jive users generated 32 percent more ideas, sent 27 percent less email and found answers to questions 32 percent faster

And there were benefits for customers. For one thing, employees spent 42 percent more time communicating with them, which in turn led to a better rate of customer retention, 31 percent, while the volume of support calls dropped by 28 percent and sales to new customers jumped by 27 percent.

The survey also found that 83 percent of companies in the survey are preparing to deploy some kind of social enterprise solution across the entire company this year. That finding is at least validated in part by a Gartner study that forecasts spending on enterprise social software will grow a little more than 15 percent this year to reach about $770 million.

Jive, you’ll remember, is the company that landed a $30 million venture capital investment from Kleiner Perkins last summer, and hired former Mercury Interactive head Tony Zingale as its CEO.

BoomTown’s Kara Swisher visited its offices last August, and her video interview with Zingale and Ted Schlein–Kleiner partner and Jive director–is below:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110131/in-case-you-needed-reminding-social-enterprise-software-is-going-to-be-big/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110124/people-like-ipad-magazine-ads-says-ipad-magazine-company/ http://allthingsd.com/20110124/people-like-ipad-magazine-ads-says-ipad-magazine-company/#comments Mon, 24 Jan 2011 13:30:46 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=28493 Have you bought an ad in an iPad magazine in the last year? Then you’re in luck! Because people who read iPad magazines like looking at the ads in those apps, and they’re more likely to buy stuff from the people who pay for them.

So says Adobe. Which, of course, is in the iPad magazine business, via publishing tools it provides for companies like Condé Nast.

No need to belabor the link. But if you want, you can read a study that supports Adobe’s argument, conducted by a professor at the University of Connecticut’s Communications department, using the inaugural edition of Condé Nast’s Wired iPad app. Here’s a chart!

And really, there’s nothing wrong–or at least nothing new–about a company promoting research that supports its sales pitch. Happens all the time.

The problem the research doesn’t address, and which Adobe can’t really do much about, is that so far iPad magazine apps simply haven’t been that popular. Which means that advertisers who sponsor them aren’t getting their message in front of enough eyeballs, receptive or no.

Maybe that will change if the publishers and Apple can work out their subscription logjam. Or maybe Google, supported by a gazillion new Android tablets, will help make these things a hit.

It’s early days, still. I can say that with confidence, and I don’t even have a Ph.D.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110124/people-like-ipad-magazine-ads-says-ipad-magazine-company/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20110111/nielsen-young-people-across-the-globe-love-their-cell-phones-but-use-them-differently/ http://allthingsd.com/20110111/nielsen-young-people-across-the-globe-love-their-cell-phones-but-use-them-differently/#comments Tue, 11 Jan 2011 11:00:36 +0000 Ina Fried http://mobilized.allthingsd.com/?p=2181 A new Nielsen report finds that young people around the world are the biggest adopters of mobile technology, though how they do so tends to vary by both location and gender.

According to the report, China is the biggest spot for the mobile Internet, with 73 percent of Chinese youths age 15 to 24 citing mobile Internet usage as among the things they used their cell phones for in the past month. By comparison, less than half of American and British cell-phone toting youths used the Internet from their mobile devices, while the rest of Europe had rates less than 25 percent.

Mobile messaging is also big, though in most parts of the world young women are far more likely than young men to send text and picture messages. There were some exceptions, such as India, where men were twice as likely as women to send texts and four times more likely to send pictures.

The Nielsen research was conducted in 19 countries, though the report broke out results only for the U.S., UK, India, Italy, Brazil, China, Spain, Russia and Germany. In most countries Nielsen surveyed 5,000 young people, though in the U.S. it surveyed 75,000 youths. In some countries the research was done face-to-face and in others the survey was done online.

In most countries across the globe, young men are more likely than women to have smartphones, though the U.S. is an exception with young women making up 55 percent of smartphone owners between 15 and 24. The adoption of smartphones versus feature phones also varies widely. In India, for example, feature phones outnumber smartphones 9 to 1 among young people, while in Italy smartphone adoption is nearing 50 percent among the younger set.

Advanced data usage was highest in the U.S and China, where about 17 in 20 young people did more than just make calls and send text and picture messages. That type of data use was least common in India, where only 13 percent did so, However, another 51 percent of Indian youths used their phones for text and/or picture messages.

The Nielsen study also looked at other patterns including use of more than one SIM card and whether phones are prepaid or postpaid, although those trends seemed to have more to do with how the country’s cell phone industry is set up as opposed to indicative of trends among youth.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110111/nielsen-young-people-across-the-globe-love-their-cell-phones-but-use-them-differently/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101221/one-in-five-to-own-tablet-by-2014-poll-finds/ http://allthingsd.com/20101221/one-in-five-to-own-tablet-by-2014-poll-finds/#comments Tue, 21 Dec 2010 14:35:16 +0000 Ina Fried http://mobilized.allthingsd.com/?p=1179 A new study finds that one in five American adults has plans to buy a tablet by 2014. The study, commissioned by Fuze Box and conducted by Harris Interactive, found that men are more likely consumers than women, with the young more likely than the old to plan a tablet purchase. In short, expect about 40 million Americans to buy a tablet in the next three years.

While that’s a significant number to be sure, I’m beginning to wonder if even that figure will be large enough to support all the players entering the tablet fray.

There are the incumbents like the iPad and Samsung’s Galaxy Tab. Motorola is gearing up to launch a Honeycomb-based Android tablet at CES. HP has said it is working on a Palm Tablet (which Fox News says is coming at CES), while RIM is readying its PlayBook for release around March.

And that’s just the big guys. Expect to hear a lot of smaller firms enter the tablet fray as well, including many at CES. Education-centered tablet maker Kno–which announced its product at last year’s D conference–has started shipping its large dual-screen and single-screen models, while Notion Ink has been further teasing its Adam tablet.

Plus, Microsoft, which has been on the outside looking in at the early slate growth, hopes to get back into the game next year as well.

Even with a big market, that leaves a lot of companies angling for a piece of the pie.

For its part, Fuze Box is touting the fact that a lot of these tablets (37 percent) will be used, at least in part, for business purposes.

But other uses will also abound. Half of users plan to use it for social networking, while even more will use it for computing tasks like sending email (75 percent), browsing the Web (78 percent), and reading books and other publications (53 percent).

As far as work uses, correspondence topped the list, followed by online meetings, marketing and training.

“Since before the iPad launched in April, we’ve persisted that tablets would soon become a widely used business tool,” Fuze Box CEO Jeff Cavins said in a statement. “With 2 in 5 tablet owners using their device for business by 2014, we have officially entered the post PC era and the potential is there to reinvent the business environment for collaboration with portable and tactile computing devices, complete with cameras, document sharing, cloud computing, and storage.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101221/one-in-five-to-own-tablet-by-2014-poll-finds/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101213/report-says-iphone-kicking-droids-posterior/ http://allthingsd.com/20101213/report-says-iphone-kicking-droids-posterior/#comments Mon, 13 Dec 2010 21:31:04 +0000 Ina Fried http://mobilized.allthingsd.com/?p=837 An analyst report making the rounds on Monday suggests that Verizon Wireless has seen its smartphone growth lag over the last few months, while iPhone sales have taken off.

According to the report, from Asymco, AT&T saw iPhone sales grow from 2.7 million devices in the first quarter to 5.3 million in the third quarter. Verizon, meanwhile, saw total smartphone shipments grow from 2.7 million units to 3.3 millon units during that same period.

In particular, the report shows Verizon growth hitting a wall in August with sales of all its major smartphones dropping from August through October. Asymco, which based its report on figures from an ITG Investment Research report as well as results from AT&T, has some very pretty charts of all this (well, pretty unless you are Verizon).

A Verizon Wireless spokesman declined comment, while AT&T was predictably happy about the report. “This report validates AT&T’s approach, which is to offer customers maximum choice in handsets, operating systems and much more,” an AT&T representative told Mobilized.

Not to quibble, but the numbers seem to speak more to the power of the iPhone against all the choices in the world.

All of this is interesting, but may prove somewhat moot for Verizon once it gets the iPhone, a development widely expected to happen early next year.

The real lesson here seems to be for the smartphone makers other than Apple, particularly those that have been heavily promoted by Verizon. (Can you hear me now, Motorola?)

Motorola has already said it expects to take a hit in the first quarter based on expected developments at Verizon. But other Android-based makers could also take a hit as the arrival of the iPhone at Verizon takes away one of the top reasons people buy a non-Apple phone–they don’t want to go with AT&T.

That said, Google has been crowing about the growth of Android, with exec Andy Rubin tweeting last week that the activations of Android-based phones now top 300,000 per day.

Update, 3:30 pm PT: Asymco clarified that the ultimate numbers used in the charts and the report were its own, based on publicly reported numbers from AT&T as well as information from an ITG Investment Research report on Verizon. Also, the company said the total number of iPhones for the third quarter should have been 5.3 million, not the figure originally listed in its report.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101213/report-says-iphone-kicking-droids-posterior/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101210/wi-fi-threat-to-trees-rooted-in-shaky-stats/ http://allthingsd.com/20101210/wi-fi-threat-to-trees-rooted-in-shaky-stats/#comments Sat, 11 Dec 2010 00:17:46 +0000 Carl Bialik http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=33882 Recent headlines in international newspapers, on television news and in technology blogs highlighted a startling statistic from the Netherlands—70 percent of urban trees are sick, up from 10 percent a few years earlier. Coupled with a second recent Dutch study that found trees exposed to Wi-Fi transmitters suffered damage to their leaves, the number painted an alarming picture of city maples and oaks withering and dying from exposure to electromagnetic radiation.

But statisticians, urban foresters and even the researchers themselves say it is too soon to declare an urban tree epidemic, let alone to blame Wi-Fi. The Dutch tree figures are from a study of 600 trees in one small city this year, and the apparent jump in tree illness is based on a misleading comparison.

Meanwhile, the study linking leaf damage to Wi-Fi is so preliminary that it hasn’t been written up, let alone peer-reviewed and published in an academic journal.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101210/wi-fi-threat-to-trees-rooted-in-shaky-stats/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101208/exclusive-chegg-buys-cramster/ http://allthingsd.com/20101208/exclusive-chegg-buys-cramster/#comments Wed, 08 Dec 2010 08:02:25 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=38270

According to sources close to the situation, online textbook rental company Chegg has acquired Cramster, a social online homework help platform.

The Pasadena, Calif.-based Cramster is the leading online study community, offering expert Q&A help, study groups and practice tests and problems. College and high school students, teachers, professors, parents and other experts add information into the network on a large range of subjects.

It was founded in 2002 and now has one million members, using either a free or premium service.

The Cramster purchase is one in a series of start-up acquisitions that Chegg has been making of late, part of a strategy to be a central place for student needs.

In late September, the company bought CourseRank, a Mountain View, Calif., start-up that helps students share course schedules, take classes with friends, and read and write reviews on classes and professors, as well as find out how professors grade.

To expand, Chegg has raised a whopping $220 million in funding from a number of venture firms, including Kleiner Perkins.

That’s because Chegg has become the front-runner in the increasingly competitive online textbook rental space, as it seeks to disrupt the $10 billion college textbook business.

Chegg got its start in 2005 at Iowa State University as a classified rental service, where books were the dominant item, but evolved its business to focus on actually doing the textbook rentals.

The company’s unusual name, Chegg, is a mashup of “chicken and egg,” and its model is similar to that of innovative video rental outfit Netflix.

Chegg now serves close to 7,000 schools across the U.S.

Typically, renting a book costs a fraction of what buying one outright does. It is ordered online and then sent to a renter, who then returns it.

Terms of the Cramster deal were not clear.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101208/exclusive-chegg-buys-cramster/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101124/pew-study-the-well-off-use-the-net-more/ http://allthingsd.com/20101124/pew-study-the-well-off-use-the-net-more/#comments Wed, 24 Nov 2010 19:20:07 +0000 Voices http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=33159 This just in from the Department of Unsurprising Research Results: The nation’s wealthier households are more likely than those less blessed to own technology gear and use the Internet. According to recent surveys by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, those making $75,000 a year and up are more likely to: Have desktops, laptops, music players and game consoles; tap into the Internet frequently and for a greater variety of tasks; and engage in e-commerce. One other note: Even among households with similar access to the Net, the wealthier were more active users.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101124/pew-study-the-well-off-use-the-net-more/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101018/another-week-another-social-networking-poll-this-time-the-kids-are-alright/ http://allthingsd.com/20101018/another-week-another-social-networking-poll-this-time-the-kids-are-alright/#comments Mon, 18 Oct 2010 13:00:03 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=35667

Last week, Common Sense Media released a poll it conducted that showed parents fretting about the growing power of social networks.

Now, TRUSTe, a Web privacy trustmark firm, has released another, titled “The Kids Are Alright,” which shows a little-nicer picture, especially for Facebook.

In fact, according to the survey–based on responses from 2,000 parents and teens, ages 13 to 17–parents and teens feel in control of social networking sites, including their privacy.

Wrote TRUSTe of the poll:

“It reflects in many ways parents and teens doing the right things on social networks. For example, parents are monitoring and engaging with their teens online; and, teens are using available privacy controls.”

The possible snafus: Teens oversharing, overfriending and, of course, overhiding from parents.

Yes, all that.

Here is the official press release, a short and long version of the study and some tips for teens, as well as a guide for parents:

TRUSTe Social Networking Survey Results Release_Draft 7_101310_KB

SNS_shortdeck

TRUSTe Parent and Teen Social Networking Study _Full_

SNS_TeenGuide

SNS_ParentGuide

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101018/another-week-another-social-networking-poll-this-time-the-kids-are-alright/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20101007/cnn-minority-of-web-users-shares-majority-of-news/ http://allthingsd.com/20101007/cnn-minority-of-web-users-shares-majority-of-news/#comments Thu, 07 Oct 2010 19:28:21 +0000 Beth Callaghan http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=30809 Just 27 percent of social media users account for 87 percent of shared news, according to new research from CNN. The study, which was conducted over two months and tracked 2,300 people, looked at different motivations for sharing, as well methods and content. Not surprisingly, social networks accounted for almost half (43 percent) of shared news.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101007/cnn-minority-of-web-users-shares-majority-of-news/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100930/android-apps-transmitting-private-data/ http://allthingsd.com/20100930/android-apps-transmitting-private-data/#comments Thu, 30 Sep 2010 17:55:02 +0000 Beth Callaghan http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=30518 A new study shows that many popular Android apps transmit private user data to advertising networks without the user’s consent or knowledge. Researchers from Duke, Penn State and Intel Labs developed an application called TaintDroid, which detects such transmissions, and tested 30 apps from the Android Market–half of which were found to be sending GPS coordinates to remote servers. The developers of the TaintDroid application plan to make it available to the public to enable user awareness of data collection.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100930/android-apps-transmitting-private-data/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100517/your-web-browser-just-told-everyone-you-visited-a-porn-site/ http://allthingsd.com/20100517/your-web-browser-just-told-everyone-you-visited-a-porn-site/#comments Mon, 17 May 2010 18:47:23 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=19584 Your identity as a dog may still be safe on the Internet. Everything else about you, though, is looking increasingly like an open book.

Latest data point: No matter what you do to stay anonymous, there’s a good chance your Web browser is betraying your identity, by leaving a unique fingerprint every time you visit a site.

A study conducted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation found that 84 percent of browsers leave a unique marker, via different combinations of settings and configurations. That percentage moves up to 94 percent if your browser uses plug-ins for Adobe’s (ADBE) Flash and Oracle’s (ORCL) Java.

What to do about it? There’s not a lot an individual user can do, the EFF says. But it says these kinds of broswers tend to be less identifiable than others:

• Those with JavaScript disabled (possibly using a tool like NoScript)
• Those that use TorButton, which successfully anticipated and defended against many fingerprinting measurements
• Mobile devices like Google’s (GOOG) Android and Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone (the study was conducted in January and February, before the iPad hit the market)
• Corporate desktop machines that are precise clones of one another

So if you’re the kind of person who only browses the Web via your smartphone, perhaps you’ll be okay. Otherwise, “the best solution for web users may be to insist that new privacy protections be built into the browsers themselves,” the EFF suggests.

Or, failing that, accept that absolute privacy–the kind where no one has any ability whatsoever to track your actions–may be unattainable on the Web. The real solution may not be a technical one, but a social one, whereby we come to a rough agreement about what we’re okay sharing and what we really, really need to keep to ourselves. That could take a while.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100517/your-web-browser-just-told-everyone-you-visited-a-porn-site/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100208/bummed-out-by-super-bowl-ads-so-are-advertisers/ http://allthingsd.com/20100208/bummed-out-by-super-bowl-ads-so-are-advertisers/#comments Mon, 08 Feb 2010 15:44:19 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=16058 Underwhelmed with last night’s Super Bowl ads? So are the people who paid for them.

The majority of TV ad buyers say they think their spots are less useful than they used to be. At least according to a new study from Forrester-ANA, which surveys top advertisers: 62 percent feel TV ads “are not as effective” as they were two years ago.

The Forrester (FORR) study is full of nuggets that will cheer those who want to radically transform the TV ad model. For instance:

• Ad buyers have reduced the amount they are spending on TV and are now allotting just 41 percent of their budgets to the boob tube, compared with 58 percent in 2008.
• 66 percent think DVRs “will destroy or reduce the effectiveness” of the 30-second ad.
• They overwhelmingly hate the existing metrics used to measure TV programming.
• 63 percent think Google (GOOG) will dominate “tomorrow’s big advertising winners,” ahead of cable operators (53 percent), cable networks (47 percent) and broadcast networks (nine percent).

So when can we declare traditional TV ads DOA? No time soon. Even in decline, TV ads are a $70 billion business, give or take a billion, and it’s going to take a lot effort to move an industry that size–even mighty Google has had no luck to date.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100208/bummed-out-by-super-bowl-ads-so-are-advertisers/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20091230/comeback-of-the-decade-reading/ http://allthingsd.com/20091230/comeback-of-the-decade-reading/#comments Wed, 30 Dec 2009 15:08:41 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=14578 Studies say you are watching more TV than ever, even as you slurp up increasing amounts of Web video. Which means you must be spending less time on something else. Like reading, perhaps?

Nope. At least not according to a new study out of the University of California, San Diego, which says reading tripled from 1980 to 2008 “because it is the overwhelmingly preferred way to receive words on the Internet”:

From Wired‘s summary:

Americans consumed 3.6 billion terabytes of information last year, averaging 11.8 hours of information consumption per day. Video and videogames constituted 55 percent of those bytes, but on average, Americans read 36 percent of the 100,500 words they consume each day, according to the San Diego study, which analyzed more than 20 data sources. The study doesn’t cover writing, but a simple glance at Facebook feeds reveals that we’re almost certainly writing more than we used to, as well.

Obligatory “to be sure” graph: To be sure, the study’s definition of “reading” is as broad as possible. So it’s not just talking about grappling with Pynchon, but many less demanding forms of “receiving words” as well. Like skimming this text. Or a text message. Or a tweet. Etc.

Also, there’s a good chance that you’re “reading” while you’re watching TV and maybe watching some Web video at the same time. The UC San Diego study allows for lots of multitasking.

Still, this isn’t bad news, right? As long as you’re reading, you’re reading. And the more you read, the better the chances we’ll avoid an “Idiocracy”-like dystopia.

[Image credit: suchitra prints]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091230/comeback-of-the-decade-reading/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090924/good-news-t-rowe-price-twitter-users-really-really-love-ads/ http://allthingsd.com/20090924/good-news-t-rowe-price-twitter-users-really-really-love-ads/#comments Thu, 24 Sep 2009 19:38:25 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=11381 So now that Twitter has its $1 billion valuation (and another $100 million in cash, not the $50 million that I’d previously heard), how is the revenue-free company going to start making money?

The perennial, and obvious, solution is to incorporate ads into the service, but so far Twitter hasn’t tried it, except for very limited experiments.

The good news for Twitter and its investors is that the service’s user base is pretty receptive to advertising, in general terms, because it’s pretty receptive to just about everything on the Web.

So says research group Interpret LLC, which has a new study out today, conveniently enough. From the release:

Twitter users are twice as likely to review or rate products online (24% vs. 12%), visit company profiles (20% vs. 11%) and click on advertisements or sponsors (20% vs.9%) as those who only belong to traditional social networking websites like Facebook and MySpace. The data suggests that Twitter users uniquely demonstrate higher engagement with brands, not just with “tweets” they post.

These statistics are self-reported, and Interpret doesn’t say how big a sample its survey used, so take them with as much salt as you like. But they seem intuitively and directionally correct: Anyone willing to plug into the waves of information that Twitter pumps out is likely engaged all over the Web.

Note what the Interpret report doesn’t say: That Twitter users are eager to have ads inserted into the service itself.

Doesn’t matter. At some point, they’re unlikely to have a choice about that because it seems hard to imagine that Twitter can ever deliver on its investors’ sky-high expectations without generating some kind of money, somehow, from Madison avenue.

Which is exactly why Biz Stone and crew, who once made a point of expressing their derision for ads, now make a point of saying that ads may not be such a terrible thing, after all.

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