The world around us

Have you checked out Swivel yet? It’s a site that I found last week and have been visiting on a daily basis to read up on stuff. The site is all about data, all kinds of data, about the weather, politics, religion, internet, traffic and much more. Users can share their insights with others on Swivel, making it quite an interesting set up. One cool feature is that you can compare any type of data to another, and they can be completely unrelated. So if you’ve ever wondered how UFO sightings compare to iPod sales, you can look exactly that up. At Swivel, it is also possible to share your insights with a post on your blog or via email.

Speed is everything they say. It only takes a second or two for a consumer to get distracted and look away, but on the internet its so much easier just to close a page, so it is essential for retailer sites to load quickly and efficiently. According to Gomez Inc., Dell.com provides the fastest highspeed broadband access time from the Top 50 retailers for the month of May and loaded in just 2.76 seconds. At second place was Zappos.com with 3.54 seconds, FootLocker.com with 3.67 seconds and JC Penney with 4.18 seconds. Using dial up connections, OfficeDepot.com was the fastest site to load in 33.05 seconds.

The retail industry is undergoing a dynamic shift to new parts of the world. With this move, retailers are realizing a whole new world of consumers out there, although adapting to new countries and consumers will require lots of changes. Even though a lot of countries don’t have a very set system of organized retail, customers are very aware of what they would like and how they would like to shop, so retailers need to study how consumers shop in each market before opening up a store there. Wal-Mart made exactly this mistake in Germany, since it set up its stores just as it did in the US, but German consumers do not respond in the same way which eventually led to the company closing down all its stores.