“I would like to take this opportunity to thank you very much for your kind support. Your multi-faceted support including generous donations, substantial technical assistance and the positive words you have been spreading about our work have been immensely useful.
Thank you for your generous support – much appreciated! Your support is enabling us to reach more people who live in poverty and contribute to bringing about lasting improvements in their lives.” Samson Hailu – International Funding Coordinator

Ve Interactive is delighted to reveal that we have been shortlisted for a UKTI Business Innovation Award for the Digital Connected World category, to be presented at Tech World on the 17th November at ExCel, London! It’s a huge honour, now in their 4th year, the awards showcase the very best in British innovation.

• Avatar Games Recruitment Ltd
• PhoneDevil Limited
• Stereografix Limited

Energy and Environment

• Cyclone Technologies
• NanoSight
• Onzo Ltd

Digital Connected World

• Immersive Forensics Ltd
• Radio Design
• Ve Interactive Ltd

Black Friday looms, it’s only 18 days away, with some US stores planning to open at midnight and 5am to lure customers in. Yes really! Some retail experts say however that store chains are fighting a losing battle to prolong a shopping rite that looks increasingly antiquated compared with the daily deals and flash sales offered by online rivals like Amazon. Indeed Amazon.com has started a Black Friday website allowing customers to shop prior to the Friday following Thanksgiving. Amazon’s website offers consumers new deals every day leading up to the big Black Friday sale.

Here’s some of the anticipated holiday shopping trends, including Black Friday statistics, where consumers will shop this year, what shoppers are spending their money on and how they are spending their time, courtesy of Credit Donkey.

Infographic courtesy of Credit Donkey

Ve Interactive is in the wings ready to help online merchants reduce shopping cart abandonment during this period, with our data capture and email remarketing solutions that increase click-throughs and conversion rates.  Adam Lynch, Director of VeServices explains:  ”We have seen a significant increase in conversion over the past couple of weeks as the build up to Christmas shopping begins and we anticipate this improving even further as the holiday season closes in.”

Ve Interactive has over 700 clients world wide who are enjoying conversions as high as 70 percent.”

It’s Internet Week Europe in London this week and appropriately our Swedish team are coming to town. For a country of only nine million inhabitants, Sweden has long punched above its weight in tech start-ups, (think Skype, Spotify and Sims Social which is battling San Fran’s CityVille to become the most played on Facebook).

Sweden’s pioneering home-computing initiative, for instance, led people to buy a million tax-free home computers in 1998 alone and one of their own internet entrepreneurs has lobbied for ever faster broadband to be rolled out across the country, leading to file-sharing sites and many tech start-ups springing up.

The Nordics are considered vibrant markets for venture capitalists because the line between tech and marketing is blurred, making for extremely productive tech start-ups. It’s also proving to be a hot place (pardon the pun) for green power. Facebook plans on building its first European server farm in Lulea, Sweden. Situated just 60 miles south of the Arctic Circle, in the land of the midnight sun, the appeal is in the actual cold of the location. Facebook’s big computer banks can be cooled with arctic air, meaning a reduction in energy consumption and this coupled with a fast-flowing river nearby, complete with a large hydroelectric dam, provides an almost exclusive local energy source, saving energy and reducing Facebook’s environmental footprint. And let’s face it (pun intended), Facebook has more users outside the US, so it makes sense for their logistics to expand into Europe.

The potential of the Nordics is huge and there are many trends in the market that boost tech entrepreneurship. We’re certainly excited to have our very own Swedish online efficiency team, taking our shopping cart abandonment solutions to the Nordic market and we’re looking forward to working together on further plans this week.

Well almost excited as the sighting of Johnny Depp on our street today. Or so say the Ve Interactive ladies who promptly went all unnecessary.

It’s only November, but Christmas is going to come early for London ‘Beliebers’ who will get to see Justin Bieber’s pretty face when he flicks the switch of the Christmas lights at the Westfield Shopping Centre next week. Coincidentally he’s got a Christmas album to add to his discography. Justin’s one of many celebs being rolled out across the country to attract shoppers. The ‘Town Hall celebrity rich list,’ compiled by The Sunday Telegraph, states that in total, 140 English councils said they had paid celebrities at least £1.3 million in the last four years to make appearances at events.

However, in spite of activities like this, store-based sales across Europe are anticipated to fall 0.5 percent to €279.6 bn in the last six weeks of this year, with consumers’ disposable incomes being squeezed by rising costs, stagnant wage growth and government austerity measures. The flip side to this, being that people are going to be looking for deals and this will drive many of them to shop online for their Christmas presents. The study was conducted in September and drew data from national statistics authorities, independent research organisations and a cross-section of 50 large retailers.

Meanwhile the Centre of Retail Research (CRR) forecasts online retail sales are predicted to jump 17.3 percent to €39.5 BN (or 12 percent of the total). So if you are an online merchant, and shopping cart abandonment statistics remain at the current industry average of 88 percent (Forrester Research), have you taken into consideration the potential revenue you will be losing if you don’t have the ability to capture that abandoned cart data to get remarketing to it? Until now that is!

Monday December the 5th at 9pm is predicted to be the UK’s busiest shopping moment according to Amazon. The first Monday in December has historically been Amazon.co.uk’s businest day and last year, orders for over 2.3 million items were placed on it. If the Monday 5th online shopping surge holds true for 2011, Justin’s ‘Under The Mistletoe’ could be well on its way to dizzy platinum heights!

As news that India has nearly 900 million mobile users is announced today, making it the second largest mobile market in the world, a report by Juniper Research has stated that the combination of mobile phones and coupons will become “a potent force in the world of mobile commerce.”

Indeed the total redemption value of mobile coupons will exceed $43 billion globally by 2016, with coupons being delivered by mobile apps. This year the figure redeemed was $5.4 billion in value. That’s a huge hike!

Mobile coupons can be part of an online merchant‘s advertising, payments and loyalty MCommerce initiatives, and according to Juniper, most organisations debuting mobile wallets are including coupon components for delivery and redemption in store through smartphones.

This then leads to the added ability for the technology to target consumers based on their location and social media activities. Let’s face it, it’s a cost-effective way to drive profitable footfall and build customer loyalty.

As Ve Interactive London continues to hire and our remaining available office space shrinks, we’re learning a lot about minimalism. As in, we’re never ever buying anything else again. The pool table however is staying.

With Ebay Inc’s Paypal, the American-based ecommerce business opening a new global operations centre in Malaysia this month, it is a further endorsement of the global opportunities available to those retailers who adopt a multichannel strategy and take advantage of ecommerce to open up international markets. The new centre, which will offer customer service and support in English to PayPal’s customers across Asia, will also provide risk and financial services operations for PayPal’s business globally. The company chose Malaysia as its next site for a centre because of accommodative policies, as well as the availability of multi-lingual workers and the fast development of ecommerce and technologies in the country.

Indeed international trade is now fully acknowledged as being key to boosting ecommerce revenue and is driving merchants to upgrade their ecommerce services so that they can enable cross-border transactions. At the eCommerce Expo in London recently, 59 percent of smaller businesses polled said that while catering to international consumers can be a challenge, it can still account for substantial revenues. Indeed a quarter stated that it can make up 30-40 percent of income. Of the 74 percent of businesses that are currently offline, 78 percent of them are motivated to rectify this by the potential of selling beyond the UK, not only to increase profits by having a greater pool of customers to sell to, but for brand awareness as well.

To read more on the revenue potential of selling without borders, you might like to read this post.

Today we’re all back to mono-chromatic clothing and the natural look, which after beers round at our Mayfair local last night, means twice the makeup again. The best costume award went to team member Mike, who came as Vicky Pollard. Normally suited and booted, Mike’s transformation into his sullen chav-tastic alter ego was both hysterical and surreal. “Shut up!” For his supreme effort, he won a bottle of Sarget de Gruaud-Larose 2001, which he promptly swapped for a Westlife CD.

The Ve Interactive London team got in touch with their inner zombies and drag queens today and paid to come to work in fancy dress! And of course today is the day you bump into ABSOLUTELY EVERYONE. However in doing so we raised £200 for our charity partner Concern Universal, which the company is going to match, making a grand total of £400 for the pot WOOT!

Hope your week started in such a colourful way too. Happy Halloween!