Archive for July, 2015

Review of my Samsung Smart Watch, 2 months on

July 30th, 2015 by Heather Maloney

Two months on, I’m very happy to keep wearing my smart watch – a Samsung Gear which connects to my Samsung 5 smart phone – albeit quite chunky on my skinny wrist, and taking up another power point for charging approximately every 3 days. It’s also important to appreciate that you need to have your smart phone nearby – about 15 – 20 metres, so the distance between my board room and my desk works perfectly well.

Samsung Gear 2

The Gear 2 is by no means the latest Samsung smart watch available – I chose that, nearly obsolete, model because it has a smaller face size than the new ones, a larger face will just look silly on my wrist. Perhaps the larger faces will eventually becoming thinner making it more palatable… we’ll see.

During the last 2 months, it’s been quite the talking point. Here’s my list of benefits of having a smart watch:

  • phone call screening – when I am not my desk I often don’t have my phone with me, and when I’m walking somewhere, handbag over the shoulder, getting my phone out of my handbag can take several all-important seconds when you’re trying to get to a call. In these situations, I can simply lift the watch up and it automatically activates the screen so that I can see who is calling.
  • phone call answering when I can’t get to the phone – it’s as simple as swiping on the green answer button to take the call. The caller is of course on the speaker at that point, but it can be better than missing an important call. Switching back to normal phone mode is easily done once I get back to my phone.
  • time 🙂 I am happy to report that I can tell the time very easily using the watch – as you lift your wrist, the watch screen automatically turns on. You can choose a clock face from a variety of options, and also choose the background colour to match your clothes. However, it is an orange watch, I don’t tend to choose colours very often.
  • pedometer – I have just recently taken up exercise again (to deal with the winter pounds) so I started up the pedometer on my watch, and the watch automatically sent through the number of steps to my Samsung Health app on the phone, and automatically resets every day so I can see whether I have been active enough on any given day, and of course do something about it!

Some things I don’t like:

  • email notifications – having your watch beside your bed going off at all hours of the night because another email came through was never going to be good, so that was left on all of about 5 minutes. The number of notifications I would have on the watch during the day as well would drive me mad, so I don’t use the phone to view emails.
  • running out of battery in the middle of the day – you end up with a useless piece of technology strapped to your wrist, and don’t know the time!
  • heart rate monitor – not that I’m too concerned about this, but I don’t find the heart rate monitor very successful on the phone; probably something to do with not having it strapped tightly enough to my wrist.

There are lots of other things I can do using the watch, including checking social media updates and the like. Practically every notification you can get on your phone you can also get on the watch. However, I don’t really need more notifications of that nature.

I’m still considering a feature/app to have our app development team build, in order to help me benefit more the device.

Of course the Apple iWatch has come out in the last couple of months. Here is an interesting review of the iWatch.

I look forward to hearing from others wearing a Samsung Smart Watch, or an Apple iWatch for that matter. How do you benefit from your smart watch?

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Integrating your shopping cart with the Google Shopping API

July 29th, 2015 by Harry Liu

The use of Google shopping is becoming more popular in Australia. The norm used to be that you would use the main Google search box, or more recently just type your search terms into the address bar and press enter, to find and compare products. Using this method, the search results is usually a list of websites, requiring you to view many sites to find the best purchase, or if you trusted them, you could use a comparison site to find you the best deal. Now we can use Google Shopping – https://www.google.com.au/shopping – to search items from a collection of ecommerce websites.
google-shopping-example

A search in Google Shopping returns an easy to navigate set of products (images, names, ratings, price) with multiple searching options, a powerful filter to narrow down the set of recommendations, and a Shortlist feature to help you select the product to purchase. Clicking on a product allows you to see more details, including any reviews, and then click through to purchase the product from the original vendor. However Google will only list products that have been submitted by an eCommerce website – Google doesn’t go out and gather product information to populate Google Shopping, as it does with the regular search engine results.

The simplest way to submit your products to the Google Shopping engine is to use the API (application programming interface) supplied by Google. We have recently implemented an automated product feed into Google Shopping for Miami Stainless, so now you can find their stainless steel products through Google Shopping e.g. search on ‘balustrade wire’.

On average it will take around 4 – 5 hours for us to implement automated integration of a Contact Point Shopping Cart website’s product information with the Google Shopping engine. You may elect to only send to Google products that aren’t on sale, or perhaps, certain categories of product – these sorts of rules can be programmed into the automated product feed from your online store.

Why not make the most of this opportunity in Google to place your products in front of more customers?

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