Daily Wrap: How Pinterest Impacts Purchases and More

Alicia Eler looks at how Pinterest is impacting purchases. This and more in today’s Daily Wrap.

Sometimes it’s difficult to catch every story that hits tech media in a day, so we wrap up some of the most talked about stories. We give you a daily recap of what you missed in the ReadWriteWeb Community, including a link to some of the most popular discussions in our offsite communities on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ as well.

What Pinterest is Doing That Facebook Isn’t

Facebook drives traffic. Pinterest drives traffic. The big difference is that Pinterest is driving target-market traffic and impacting purchases. How is Pinterest perfecting what Facebook has been trying to do for some time? Alicia Eler says Facebook confuses the social graph with the interest graph. To learn more about how Pinterest is knocking it out of the park, read, What Pinterest is Doing That Facebook Isn’t.

More Must Read Stories:

Google Fires Kenya Lead Over Mocality

Google has reportedly fired its Kenya country manager, Olga Arara-Kimani, over a fraudulent use of Mocality’s data.

Nairobitech reported:

“The Google Mocality saga has drawn its first casualties. Kenya country lead for Google, Olga Arara-Kimani formerly of Safaricom has been let go by the company. Also axed is a technical guy in Zurich… It is not clear how Olga was picked for the fall but as one observer noted, sometimes a sacrificial lamb has to be found for the brand name to weather the storm.” (more)

Feds to Megaupload Users: Tough Luck

Well, now we know what happens to our data if federal authorities ever seize a website we were using, arrest its owners and shut the whole thing down. For former users of Megaupload, the prospect of losing their data forever is now a very real one. The companies that host all of that data could start deleting it later this week, according to prosecutors. (more)

Why Goodreads Gave Up on Amazon

Goodreads, the social network for reading and reviewing books, had to make a change this month. It moved away from its main source of book data, the Amazon Product Advertising API, citing its “many restrictions.” It completed the transition to Ingram Book Company’s data today, and it also draws from other open data sources such as libraries. The transition went smoothly, but Goodreads did lose some data. “Fewer than 2% of our 7 million users have books currently affected,” Goodreads says. (more)

What Does Siri’s Future Look Like?

It’s only been three months since Apple unveiled Siri, the voice-controlled personal assistant built into the iPhone 4S. Although the product is technically in beta, it has already spawned imitations and Web video parodies. What is perhaps most exciting about Siri is not what it does now, but in its potential future uses. (more)

Hollywood Isn’t Ruining DVD Rentals On Its Own: Netflix is Happy to Help

It’s easy to slam Hollywood for not understanding how technology works, or for putting its legacy business models ahead of user experience. Especially when big media companies do things like restrict digital access to movies and then cry about piracy.

But Hollywood isn’t always acting alone. Sometimes, the savviest Web companies around – Netflix, for instance – are playing along, with their own agendas. (more)

Forrester Ranks Mobile Marketing Companies, Ignores the Brightest Startups

The necessity of having a clear and cohesive mobile marketing strategy has never been greater. Companies that do not have a mobile marketing strategy now are light years behind the curve in the face of booming smartphone adoption and changing consumer behavior. Research firm Forrester took a look at some of the biggest and best mobile marketing companies to see how they stack up and what benefits they can add for companies. (more)

[Research] Half of U.S. Cellphone Owners Research In-Store Goods With Their Devices

The rise of mobile commerce is going to give traditional retail stores a headache. Results from a survey done by the Pew Internet and American Life Project shows that 25% of cellphone owners used their phone to look up the price of a product before buying it at a store. More than half of cellphone owners used their phones to determine what product to buy while in a retail store. (more)

Study: 91% of Gen-Ys Use Their Phones in the Bathroom

Some people won’t go anywhere without their smartphones. Not even the pot.

A new study from 11mark surveyed 1,000 Americans about their smartphone usage, and found that a whopping 75% of American smartphone owners have used their phones in the bathroom. More women have used their phones in the bathroom than men (76% vs. 74%), but men are actually more attached to their mobile devices than women. Thirty percent of men surveyed said they won’t go to the bathroom without their phone versus 25% of women.(more)

Select Testers Get First Office 15 Preview, New Cloud Services Emphasized

Whether Windows 8′s radically re-imagined usage model catches on with tablet and PC users will depend in large part upon the role Microsoft Office apps will play. If it looks too much like Office 2010, then having Windows 8 relegate Office to the “Desktop” side while mobile-style apps take over the “Metro” side, won’t make much sense. (more)

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