Cyber Monday is here, and it is in many ways bigger than Black Friday in some ways. In the past, Black Friday and the days before Christmas used to hog all the attention. Now, with Amazon’s dominance in ecommerce, Cyber Week and Cyber Monday have become more important than the shopping in the physical stores. This was a slow process but it really began with the Pandemic when people got more used to shopping online.
People were already having these habits before the pandemic, but Amazon and many ecommerce shops were able to fulfill a need for many consumers.
Amazon Rufus along with other shopping chatbots are changing the way we shop and leading to higher sales. Companies need to take advantage of generative AI. Most chatbots in the past were only really good at specific questions. The new generation of generative AI is helping to make shopping more precise and personal in a way the old model of searching and scrolling was unable to accomplish here.
Shopping AI is truly a big change for shoppers.
They can now check prices month to month. This was only available on select sites, not its more holistic and you type in about any product without old style searching here.
There is more of a move towards frictionless commerce. Shoppers can spend more time on the quality of the product instead of going through search bars and inconsistent search engines.
Customers are able to Auto-Buy based on price changes, allowing for people to spend more time on other aspects of their holidays.
Customers are saving time shopping.
Shops now have to focus on quality not just getting on search results on the sites.
Many business owners are now seeing that Search Engine Optimization on Amazon and other search sites has to have an element of quality in your product.
Customer Reviews are now more important than before. As Rufus is collecting these reviews to make a summary, you need to make sure that your products are reviewing well now. Whereas before customers may not scroll to see reviews, they will see them in the summaries.
Quality matters not just gaming the SEO game.
I hope that stores realize the important power of shopping AI and make the shopping experience more enjoyable.
Since I started shopping online, I have noticed that scams have been increasing more than before. There have been so many hackers attacking websites, stealing data, sending social engineering emails which trick you. There are so many threats to keep track of in this age; the average citizen has no clue as to what to focus their energy on to keep the money in their wallets.
The sliest trick: The Fake Website Email or Message
In the early days of the internet, most hackers tended to focus on the inexperience of the users. As users got more comfortable with using the internet, they became even more cunning, attempting to weaponize what they saw as their home in cyberspace.
The culture we have now in cyberspace is under attack from all sides. We have outages happening more often than even in the 1990s. These outages are occurring almost every month, affecting economies.
The hackers and scammers are damaging the economy to gain an advantage. You should be steely prepared for scams throughout the holiday season.
The most important scam you be aware of is this one: the fake website.
The fake website is very common scam that hackers use but it is probably one of the most insidious out there and I have even come close to falling for it, almost giving a hacker some of the money in my bank account here.
The main aspect you need to consider is to look at the address in the email or message sent to you here.
You must check the address carefully. If the address is saying that it is from the official site and has the “.com” in it, then it should be a legitimate email or message.
However, if the address looks really strange and not like an official address, you should not be clicking any links in the message. Generally speaking, the strangeness is that address has not form or structure in here.
You should also watch for the emails that aim to copy the style of the website. Some of the details are not authentic to the actual website.
Check your original website emails and then compare them to these emails. If they look sketchy, then they are.
With these steps, you will be able to stay safe this holiday season.
Game Streaming is still a work in progress and has struggled to truly take off in the way that video streaming did slowly with RealPlayer and then solidifying with YouTube and Netflix.
The issue with Game Streaming vs Video Streaming
Video streaming is an easier concept to understand for most people. Simply have video delivered by digital information transmissions rather than analog signals. Even with the analog televisions, it is a simple concept. You turn on the television and switch to a channel which receives a signal. In many ways, it is still magical experience. You have a screen which puts people in a box and you hear their voices and see their movements. However, it is a concept which is simple to explain to the ordinary customers, especially in an age where tinkering isn’t a popular in our nation.
Video Games have been on the sidelines for many years, unable to break out its role as the strange cousin of the realizable standbys of television and earlier, radio shows. Another issue is that video games are not movies. They are interactive experiences which separates them from movies and puts them in the same place as the circus or sports. This comparison may make some gamers have an inferiority complex as they want to constantly have video games be taken seriously. Even with all the great stories, video games are still seen as a product of immature people even though many of the people making those statements belong to industries that exploit video games for content to make their movies and shows.
The way to change this is Game Streaming.
However, streaming a video game isn’t the same as streaming a movie. The difference in bandwidth is immense and video games began largely as physical objects, now mostly digital and now there needs to be a reliable to stream a video game from a server without requiring downloads or physical means. While some gamers may prefer physical copies, which I can agree with, most people will be satisfied with having a digital copy. However, the issue of storage is coming back one again. On my computer, I can only fit so many games and these huge games are making it tough to enjoy a variety of games, leaving me to play really old games or a single release. Such a situation leads players to concentrate their attention onto a few games or to not even pay attention to their backlog at all, making it tough for independents to make an impact on the industry when players all play the same game.
Game streaming can help bring gamers of all stripes together. Nvidia’s Geforce Now is a great compromise, allowing for a much larger library of games to be played as you have just add your game library and you can stream tons of games that would otherwise be unplayable on her computer. I have already explained how GeForce Now is a great service. Without it, I wouldn’t have been able to play the Remastered version of the Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.
However, I had to switch to Amazon Luna.
Why?
Simply because it’s already bundled with my Prime Subscription. That helps in reducing the cost of the service. With Nvidia GeForce Now, the premium option (the best option) costs $19.99 and it has the best graphics chips in the servers. However, it is not worth the price right now. You have to buy the games separately and this adds to the cost. Some games on GeForce Now are free to play games but other game services have free to play games, so this is not as exclusive or as important as it seems here.
Amazon Luna has less games, but it is already bundled with my prime subscription and that is very important. I do not have to add anymore subscriptions to my account here.
Amazon also provides a Premium subscription with more games which costs more but bundling it with the Prime account is a great move on their part here. They also have other premium subscription choices to link up with other stores. The real star of the show which made me use the service was the inclusion of Skyrim in the service. My steam copy of Skyrim was getting glitchy on my computer and I needed another way to play this classic game.
Skyrim on Amazon Luna plays well and that is all I really needed. My laptop often overheats when playing a game installed on the machine, so I needed a virtual way of passing that issue.
Nvidia GeForce Now is a great service, but I needed to switch as it fits with my budget right now. Battlefield 6 was the main reason why I was paying for the service. As Battlefield 6 has many hackers and issues at the moment, I am going to wait and let the people who work on the game to smooth out any problems so that the gameplay experience is more enjoyable for me and other users.
Amazon Luna is probably the best game streaming service right now if one wants to just play and not have to worry about space on their computers. There is a limitation in games available but that if that really worries you, there are other premium additions that you can add to the service. Many people already have a prime subscription as one can clearly see with all the Amazon vehicles on a daily basis moving around America’s cities and communities. It is worth the money and I recommend that people subscribe to Amazon Luna if they want a way to stream without taking space.
It is also a great way to expose more people to gaming as it can be kind of an elitist space, but game streaming makes more available to those who wish to enter this incredible cyberspace of play and entertainment. The video game industry has great potential, and we need to be able to expand the culture of gaming beyond what we have seen before here. Being able to just pick up and play will bring in new people and maybe ideas so that gaming can start to innovate once again and bring some much-needed creativity into America and the gaming community.
My Game Reviews 