The Power of Retail

Have you seen Google’s newly launched Google Calender Gallery? In the new system, you can add events and reminders with just one click. While calling its new tool the “next best thing to a personal concierge,” the company has added calenders from a variety of sources, including Atlantic Records, The New York Times, TLC, Disney, Eventful, JamBase and many more. You browse for events based on type or by zip code. I’ve not used Google Calender so far, but with these additions, I think the time has come to test it out for myself.

Dubai based Landmark Group announced that it would be bringing in additional foreign brands to the country. The company has so far brought in four brands, Kappa, Springfield, Bossini and Joseph Seibel. An international women’s footwear brand will be one of the new brands that will be coming onto the market, and will cater to the mid-market segment, competing with Indian brands such as Soles and Citywalk. The four Landmark brands have 30 stores across India at present.

Thousands or rather millions of people create websites and blogs every single day and thousands more abandon them as well. One of the more prominent web site hosting companies is Go Daddy, which announced that it would be taking over the domain names of rival firm RegisterFly.com, which has been beset with financial and other problems. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) estimates that there are 85,000 domain names that will need to be transferred to GoDaddy.com. Customers will not be able to renew or upgrade their accounts in the meantime.

Best Buy was the number one retailer for computer and consumer electronics for the month of April for the highest number of unique visitors, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. The retailer’s visitors rose from 10.26 million in April last year to 10.78 million this year, an increase of 5%. Other high performers were, eBay Electronics, Circuit City and eBay Computers.

Interestingly, visitors did not spend the maximum time at Best Buy, but rather at CDW at 24:36 minutes. Best Buy’s visitors stayed on their site for just 9:10 minutes, but spent the maximum amount of money, showing that it’s customers had already made up their mind to purchase something and were not the typical browsers.

Definitely an interesting idea here. Rod Farthing, a part-time professor has launched an independent mobile service called Farthing Mobile a few weeks back after being tired with the kind of service he was getting. At present he has a total subscription of 8 people, so far only friends and family members. Farthing decided he would start his own network, or what is called a MVNO, a mobile virtual network operator, that transmits calls on an existing wireless network. He could be called the leader in this do-it-yourself cell phone network system. The system is powered by Sonopia which is offering people and groups to set up their own personalized wireless service for free.

No need to worry about back-room details, like billing and customer support Reliable hosting solutions with 24×7x365 support – Visit HostMySite.com, for the service. Sonopia handles all that. Prices for the service plans are competitive with name-brand providers. An added bonus: Sonopia pays virtual network founders 3 percent to 8 percent — depending on the number of subscribers — of their service’s monthly revenue.

The Pop-up trend is taking off in every direction. First there were pop-up retail stores, then pop-up hotels and resorts and now there are pop-up bakeries. It’s really a higher version of the roadside bake sale, but there is still lots of potential for it to grow into something bigger. The buzz is on Treat Street, which is setting up shop in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles in a secretive sort of way, so no one knows where they will appear next. Springwise reports that clues to where the guerrilla bakery will turn up next are posted on their website, along with pictures of past locations and events. Part of the trick to their success is the excitement and novelty of the idea, which makes them more memorable and makes shopping there almost like an event for consumers.

Limited Brands announced that it would be selling part of the Express brand of apparel and is considering options for its Limited chain of stores. Limited is re-working it’s business to focus on the personal care, beauty and lingerie business with its Bath & Body Works and Victoria’s Secret brands. The company will sell 67% of Express to affiliates of Golden Gate Capital, private equity firm, fro $548 million.

Limited Brands had earlier sold two of it’s other apparel brands, Lane Bryant in 2001 and Lerner New York in 2002. To consolidate its inner-wear segment, the company purchased Canadian company La Senza Corp. earlier this year for $628 million. The company has been showing strong gains in its inner-wear and beauty products, its sales for Victoria’s Secret rose by 11% and for Bath & Body Works rose by 10%, as compared to a decrease of 2% for its apparel brands.

Borders will be creating its own e-commerce site instead of using Amazon as it currently does. The new site will be launched in early 2008. At present, the Borders online shopping site is actually an Amazon site with a logo of Borders at the top, and Amazon supplies all the merchandise that it sells of Borders, giving Borders a commission for its name. Borders has over 1,200 stores that sell books, music, movies and magazines across the world, but has still not operated its own website since 2001. When it launches its own site, consumers who have the Borders Rewards cards will be able to use them online as well.

MySpace is getting into the news business. The company hopes that the new feature will bring a wider audience to its site by which it hopes to becoming similar to Yahoo. While other user recommended services like Digg and Netscape rely mostly on submissions by its members, MySpace will be able to scan web journals for news and categorized them. MySpace will allow readers to vote on items, to see which items deserve to be on the front page.

As part of the service, MySpace will pull and display headlines from the outside news sites, a practice that contributed to legal challenges against Google. The search engine leader recently reached a settlement with Agence France-Presse and earlier with The Associated Press, although no lawsuit had been filed by the AP.