It's very much a traffic play, and way to take product interest offline back online.
Contastic's site looks like it went offline back in January, which Contastic now tells us was due to the acquisition.
He's not exactly alone in doing things the old-school way: The US Department of Commerce quarterly e-commerce sales report released last month showed approximately 90percentt of retail sales took place at physical locations; the same report estimated about 98percentt of retail sales occurred offline back in 2005.
This is especially true of BuyMedia Inc. (www.buy media.com), a Burlingame, Calif., company that this year acquired Marketron, TVScan and Cablescan, the offline, back-end processing systems that are the industry standard for radio, television and cable.
SocialSafe, the Facebook back-up tool from 1minus1 and Julian Ranger's iBundle, has added support for Twitter so that users can make an offline back-up of their tweets, @mentions, Direct Messages, profile and follower structure.
"It has, in no small part, gotten them offline and back onto the streets to start reëngaging in the street battles, which is something we had not seen a lot of during the Obama years".
Alipay, which claims about 450 million active registered users, launched the Alipay Wallet smartphone app, which stores credit card and coupon information and can be used for offline payments, back in 2013.
Fings For Fido's tech (what little there is) is bespoke, too, shunning an off-the-shelf e-commerce solution to enable it to add additional features such as QR codes on each box that link directly to a feedback page, essentially creating a 360 degree loop that circles online to offline and back again, and helps suppliers and Fings For Fido itself learn more about what works and what doesn't.
But this kind of explanation seems like a way of dragging the offline world back into the online one.
Maybe that means going offline, and back to handing out flyers and depending on word of mouth to promote parties.
Leaders from utilities in the EU also talked about how they have integrated the intermittent sources from solar and wind into the grid - including how they handled a recent solar eclipse in Germany which forced 40 gigawatts of solar offline and back on in minutes.
