In case customers run out of distractions on the Web, Starbucks is giving them even more reason to sit and browse, offering free online articles, music, videos and local information through a partnership with Yahoo.
Speak the Culture – a new set of travel guides which aim to give you a working knowledge of the indefinable gestalt of a country – look rather good on the basis of a casual browse, offering an informal introduction to the philosophy, food and artistic preconceptions of various European countries.
The authors explore this issue in an online experiment with 273 subjects browsing 4 websites offering identical products but with variable levels of interactivity and personalization features.
They go on to explain that their store provides "a safe place for couples to browse", as well as offering assurances that "your order will be shipped in a confidential, indiscriminate, plain and simple box!" Meanwhile, the Kama Sutra, that Bible of sex fans everywhere, is strictly forbidden, as it allegedly originates "from ancient polytheistic pseudo-religious Hindi spiritual teaching".
But, in international markets, it's freer to experiment with offering private browsing as a lure to drive usage (and better compete with data-harvesting behemoth Google).
The Medypal service will go live February 1. "Using the app, patients can search for healthcare procedures, go through the list of hospitals offering those procedures, browse through the profiles of the doctors, and check the facilities offered by hospitals before finally shortlisting the hospitals," said Rammohan.
The initiative is one of many that will eventually see London dotted with hotspots offering free net browsing.
In the near future he sees Pioco offering location-based browsing, and creating a centralized network to manage content and track usage.
The project's overall goal is to speed up web browsing on mobile devices by offering an open framework called AMP HTML, based on existing web technologies, that allows for more lightweight and speedier mobile web pages.
While the release date is different, the software is the same – offering a horizontal browsing experience designed to surface content from your library that you should find especially interesting.
Google AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages), as you may recall, is Google's project to speed up web browsing on mobile devices by offering optimized versions of publishers' sites that aren't bogged down by third-party scripts and other extension mechanisms that can slow or stop the page from rendering.
