Price Comparison on Mobile Expected to Increase for the Holidays

Mobile Commerce Daily reports on Deloitte’s new annual survey showing that 59% of smartphone owners plan on using their devices for price comparison shopping during the holiday season.  While 44% percent of consumers who own smartphones  plan on using social media connections to seek out advice, discounts, and reviews. 

Links to Recent Accessibility Stories

This article is in a recent issue of The Chronicles of Higher Education providing links to the latest piece on how to build and apply digital resources that are accessible to everybody.   If you have trouble with the links below try going straight to the article.

• “Accessibility for Web Writers”
• “the Business Case for Accessibility.”
• “The a11y Bugs Project”
• “Will copyright hamper IP closed captioning?”
• “It’s not as hard as you think.”
• “HTML 5 Video, Text Tracks, and Audio Descriptions Made Easy (or at least easier)”
• “Assistive Technology Experiment: Dragon NaturallySpeaking.”
• “an open source software tool for creating DAISY compliant audio books.”
• “Mobile Accessibility Lite’
• “[Understand] the purpose of an image using alt text.”
• “Campaign of the Month”
• “An Introductory Set of Accessible Mobile Applications.”
• “Access My N.Y.C. “
• “Apps for Autism”
• “an extremely detailed set of resources about ARIA

CourseSmart Integrates with BlackBoard

The Wall Street Journal reports that CourseSmart has developed a new integration platform to work seamlessly with Blackboard.  The single sign-on function allows students and faculty access to CourseSmart's digital course catalog by logging into the Blackboard Learn platform without having to sign into CourseSmart.  This means that faculty who are using Blackboard do not have to leave the platform and instead link required reading assignment, homework problems or other activities that exist in their digital course materials and share that information with their students.

The Blackboard Building Block for CourseSmart is free to higher education institutions, according to the article. Matthew Small, chief business officer at Blackboard says,  "The pilots we are currently running with CourseSmart as part of our signature partnership will continue to fuel this experience as they provide our clients with anytime, anywhere access to their digital course materials from any Web-enabled device, including mobile devices running on the iOS and Android(TM) OS platforms."

The First "Smartbook"

There is news that Atria Books plans to insert RFID chip in 1000 copies of the book THE IMPULSE ECONOMY: Understanding Mobile Shoppers and What Makes Them Buy, making it the first “smart book.”   The consumer's can tap their NFC enabled phone to the RFID sticker and the phone will automatically open the phone's mobile web browser on specific book-related content.

"Proximity marketing solutions like NFC will allow for seamless and frictionless interactive experience whether this is for interactive content on your phone or mobile wallet commerce opportunities," says Gary Schwartz, the author of THE IMPULSE ECONOMY. "This new breed of consumer is using the mobile phone in the physical store to select products, research purchases, and act on content."

Atria Books is an imprint of Simon & Schuster, a part of CBS Corporation.

Study Shows Increase In Mobile for Banking and Credit Card Services

A recent study by comScore reveals a rise in mobile usage for banking, credit card, and auto and property insurance services.

The study shows that 12.7 million mobile users used mobile banking, an increase of 45% from 2010.  For mobile credit card services there was an increase of 23% at 18.4 million mobile users.  Use of mobile for auto and property insurance services saw an increase of 19% with 7.2 million mobile users.

“The investments in mobile made by financial services institutions, along with the continued growth in smartphone adoption, have had a truly positive effect on the use of mobile financial services,” said Sarah Lenart, comScore vice president for Marketing Solutions. “New apps and mobile-enhanced sites have made it easier for customers to seek out financial information using mobile devices. With tablets and other web-enabled connected devices gaining popularity in addition to smartphones, financial service institutions are poised for additional growth in mobile access.”

This is an important trend to keep an eye on since mobile will be an expected service in many industries especially for college bound students who as we know use mobile all the time.

Copyright Office's Priorities for 2011-2013

The United States Copyright Office released a report on the Office’s priorities and focus subject areas for the over next two years with respect to copyright policy and administrative practice and a series of new projects designed to improve the quality and efficiency of its services in the twenty-first century.   The Office’s policy priorities for the next 24 months are as follows, subject to new developments in the United States and abroad.  Some of the notable items, according to the Register, includes streamlining litigation, perhaps even a recommendation for a special venue for copyright litigation, Orphan Works, and Library exemptions.

STUDIES

Small claims solutions for copyright owners

Legal treatment of pre-1972 sound recordings

Mass book digitization

LEGISLATIVE WORK

Rogue websites

Illegal streaming

Public performance right in sound recordings

Orphan works

Copyright exceptions for libraries

Market-based licensing for cable an d satellite retransmission

TRADE AND FOREIGN RELATIONS

World intellectual property organization (wipo)

Trans-pacific partnership and other trade priorities

Priorities in Administrative law Practice

Prohibition on circumvention of measures controlling access to copyrighted works

Electronic system for the designation of agents under the dmca

Review of group registration options

Registration options for websites and other forms of digital authorship

Electronic administration of the statutory licenses

Recording notices of termination of copyright transfers

Special Projects

Study of fees and services

Revision of the compendium of copyright office practices

Technical upgrades to electronic registration

Dialogues and roundtables with copyright community

Research partnerships with academic community

Revision of copyright office website

Public outreach and copyright education

Business process reengineering of recordation division

Public access to historical records

Skills training for copyright office staff

Local libraries sell e-books too

A story from last month discussed a new offering that would allow local libraries around the world to provide eBook catalogs to their patrons.  The new functionality would provide library visitors the ability to reference, browse, sample, and buy eBooks that are not available through the library system by linking them to national and local booksellers.

"Public libraries offer for lending a small fraction of publishers' ebook or audiobook catalogs," said Erica Lazzaro, OverDrive Director of Publisher Relations. This initiative "will take hundreds of thousands of early, midlist, and backlist eBook titles that are virtually invisible to library customers and present them for discovery. [It] will also enable for patrons who do not want to wait for popular titles to become available the option to immediately shop for it from a list of booksellers that support their local library."

With local libraries entering the retail ebook business, local booksellers will find themselves with even more competition.  The emphasis here is on future market share, to be sure, but it is a great example of the potential of emerging technologies can reshape entire industries.