Hasta La Gadget!

When it comes to online shopping, do you prefer to use your mobile device or would you prefer to log onto a PC? Well if the recent statistics provided by IBM’s Digital Analytics Benchmark Hub is any indication, it would seem as though iOS is the platform of choice when it comes to online shopping, with the results showing that online shopping done on iOS devices accounted for 83% of sales, and was around 5 times more than Android devices. IBM reports that iOS drove 23% of sales versus Android’s 4.6%.

The report also revealed that iOS users tended to spend more on their purchases, with an average of $93.94 per order, compared to Android users who spent about $48.10 per order. It was also found that tablet users tended to pay more when they shopped online compared to smartphone users, with an average of $95.61 versus $85.11 for smartphone shoppers. These are some pretty interesting statistics and while they might not necessarily tell the whole story, it is pretty compelling nonetheless.

In the meantime what do you guys make of it? Is there a particular reason why iOS users tend to prefer shopping on their mobile devices and spend more, at least when compared to Android?

iOS Proves To Be More Popular Than Android For Shopping During The Christmas Season original content from Ubergizmo.

Remember Guy Laramée, the French artist who sculpts shockingly realistic landscapesout of old books? Well, he’s still at it—and his latest is an ode to the Encyclopedia Britannica, the publishers of which announced last year that they would stop printing the 245-year-old volumes.

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Is the piracy of music a big deal? On the business side of things, sure. Music downloaded basically equals to album/single sales that have been potentially lost. After all if you can have it for free, why bother paying for it, right? Record labels, publishers, and some artists see it that way, but then again there are also those who don’t think of it as too big a deal, and legendary British metal band, Iron Maiden, is one of them. The band relied on data-mining company, Musicmetric, to monitor its growth on social media websites and found that there was a spike in popularity over in Latin America.

Ironically enough Latin America is also where a large amount of Iron Maiden’s materials get pirated, but instead of using those metrics to hunt the pirates down, Iron Maiden decided to fly down there and put on a show for them. Their efforts, instead of pursuing the legal option, have actually managed to net the band around $2.5 million in revenue from a single show that was recently held in Sao Paulo, Brazil. This move also managed to garner the band an additional 5 million followers on its social media pages from 2012 to 2013.

Artists typically make a huge bulk of their money from touring and selling merchandize. While album sales are important, they are typically used to help recoup expenses made by the record label in the production and marketing of the album, with cuts typically favoring the label (although this depends on the contract between the artist and the label). Iron Maiden is also well-established which means that this would be easier for them to pull off compared to an up and coming artist, but what do you guys think?

Iron Maiden’s Response To Piracy Has Actually Gained Them More Fans original content from Ubergizmo.

Apple products, for the most part, tend to be more expensive than their alternatives. For example their Mac computers are typically more expensive than their Windows counterpart, so it would be a safe assumption to think that the Mac Pro could be considered overpriced as well, or is it? Attempting to find out if we would be paying an “Apple tax” on the Mac Pro, Futurelooks editor Stephen Fung decided to build a Windows version of the Mac Pro to see what the difference in price was, and surprisingly it turns out that the Windows version of the Mac Pro cost around 20% more.

Fung first started by building the highest-end Mac Pro possible which cost $9,599, and then attempted to do the same with Windows using parts from major retailers, all of which amounted to around $11,530.54. This was replicated with the base Mac Pro model which sits at $2,999, with the Windows version costing Fung around $3,994.65. Like we said, the prices Fung used were retail parts which does admittedly cost more than if a manufacturer were to make them. Fung also notes that there is a trade-off to either build (besides the obvious difference in OS), with the Windows version being more upgradeable whilst the Mac Pro tended to rely on more proprietary components.

Apple’s Mac Pro was made available not too long ago but it seems that due to its popularity as well as possible hiccups at the manufacturing facility in Austin, Texas, the shipping times for newer Mac Pros has slipped to February 2014.

A Windows-equivalent Mac Pro Might Actually Cost More original content from Ubergizmo.

If you ever thought that Scarlett Johansson looked like Marilyn Monroe or that George Clooney reminded you of Cary Grant or that certain celebrities today make you think of famous people from years past, you’re not crazy. It’s true. Beautiful famous people look like beautiful famous people, no matter the era. And these photographs in George Chamoun’s Iconatomy photo series prove that.

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