With £2.8bn spent on online shopping during Christmasin UK aloneit’s not hard to see that in 2010 e-commerce has become equally important to brands as brick and mortar stores. As e-commerce gains in popularity, the shoppers’ expectations rise along. Consumers look for a rich online experience and have high standards about customer service and product experience, while at the same time the financial crisis “trained” them to compare prices and go after price for value purchases....

Twitterhas now closed the deal acquiredTweetDeckfor over $40 million in cash and stock, our sources report. CNNMoney has alsoconfirmed the deal. We’vereported on rumors around the purchase before, when the deal was estimated to be worth $50 million — a fair chunk of change more than the TweetDeck founders ended up with. TweetDeck is a Twitter client that brings more advanced management to the web service than the native client offers, and this purchase fuels speculation that Twitter is looking to improve its offerings for power users....

Whenwe first wroteaboutDealerya few months ago, we were pretty impressed not only by its look but also by the way that it took deals from so many different services and aggregated them into a single page. Instead of having to weed through email, a visit to Dealery could tell you what was going on in your area. The latest update to Dealery continues to improve upon an already great service by extended it by introducing Dealery Exclusive Deals....

Dear Algorithms, You were supposed to be the solution to all of my problems, helping me cut down on the time it takes to find, dig and explore information. The wait time between looking for something and knowing something is almost gone. Do you remember our excitement whenGoogle Instant came into our lives to save us 3 seconds for every search? It is great to access information at the speed of Google, but it can feel pointless if you can not share the experience or benefit from others who’ve gone through the process....

What if I told you I was selling a set of computer programs that could automagically solve all of your hiring, diversity, and management problems overnight? You’d be stupid not to at least listen to the rest of the offer, right? Of course no such system exists. The vast majority of AI products purported to predict social outcomes are blatant scams. The fact that most of them are legal doesn’t stop them from being snake oil....