Official Blog

The new year starts off with an exciting event at our zanox Campus. On January 27 and 28, the Live Shopping Days will again take place in Berlin and attract more than 200 e-commerce professionals, start-up founders and investors. The Live Shopping Days are being organised by  Exciting Commerce and have become Germany’s biggest and most important event of its kind.

For the first time, the Live Shopping Days will also host the Exceed Programme, a full day of workshops and open exchange surrounding fresh ideas, apps and concepts. The US live shopping pioneers of Woot! will hold this year’s keynote, our zanox Application Store team will lead a workshop on apps and e-commerce, and word-of-mouth expert Martin Oetting will talk about viral factors within the e-commerce industry. Also, the most promising international startups will have the chance to present their concepts of success.  And of course there will be loads of time for networking and exchanging ideas and knowledge.

There are only a few tickets left, so if you want to be part of the Live Shopping Days 2010, make sure to get your ticket soon. Here, you can also check out a video with last year’s highlights (in German). Looking forward to seeing you around soon!

There have been added more than half a dozen new apps since the launch of the zanox Application Store and even more are in the pipeline! Time for us to pick some of our favourite novelties and update you on what’s new. The great thing is: The are all for free! If you want to learn more you can find detailed descritptions on our new apps on the Web Services blog.

To start with, dealunited has provided our advertisers and price comparison publishers with the first Software as a Service (SaaS) in the Store. The tool helps to monetise potentially lost traffic: if a customer cancels the shopping process, the dealunited software offers him to get the product for free if he buys something else on a different partner site. Get a more detailed overview on how this tool works here or get it right away in our Application Store.

Here is something fancy for fans of Google Android mobile phones: The Andora app allows you to scan the barcodes of products, check their price and availibility within our network and also to recommend it to your friends via Twitter.

The Shopotainment Publisher Widget is a service enabling interaction with the product database through social networks, widgets, RSS-feeds, or the shopotainment portal. The systems suggests interesting products for recommendation to friends by learning the users preferences.

We also have two new plug-ins for WordPress CMS users: One adds contextual product data links out of the 60 million zanox product database to each post; the other one enriches the blog search results with product hits from our database.

At last but not least, this is definitely one of our favourites: the BMI widget by the Sweden-based DreamBuilders team! The body mass index (BMI), or Quetelet index, is a statistical measurement which compares a person’s weight and height.  The widget calculates the user’s BMI and – if needed – suggests fitness equipment Special thanks to Sebastian of our Web Services team to try it out – he was suggested a leg trainer, by the way