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with modern monitors any- way with many of them you can use.
Lately many Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail accounts to some ex- tent have been getting their pass- words hacked. Spammers are doing this not necessarily to steal your information but to send spam to others without it being traced back to them. Always make sure your passwords are relatively complex. They should be at least eight characters utilizing combi- nations of upper and lower case letters, numbers and a special character or two. By a special character I mean something like @,!, &,*, etc… Get in the habit of changing your password every 2 – 3 months.
As for attachments that come in an email, the best advice is un- less you expect an attachment - don’t open it. Antivirus programs have a hard time seeing inside a zip or rar file so there very well could be a virus bomb in there. If you receive an attachment that has an .exe, .bat, .scr extension, don’t’ open it, they are executable type files. That means that they execute or otherwise cause code to run.
When using social media such as Facebook, others can post links on your page. Some- times your friends aren’t your friends and they’ll post links to websites that will try to download malware onto your computer so be careful when clicking on links.
There are literally hundreds of thousands of infected web servers on the internet and in many cases the owners or users of those serv- ers aren’t even aware their server is infected. An antivirus program like the latest version of Avast will check a web page before it allows your browser to go to it. That is something to consider when look- ing for an antivirus program. Lastly, just use common
sense. If something seems too good to be true then it probably is.
Remember questions and ideas for future columns are al- ways welcomed. We want and value your feedback so please feel free to contact us.
Andrew Lord has been doing Economics and Information Tech- nology for over thirty years and is one of the owners of Intentus, a full service, one-stop econom- ics consulting and information technology services company. Intentus’ website is
www.inten-
tusgroup.com. Please feel free to contact him via info@neigh-
borsnewspaper.com.
Who Uses QR Codes? According to a recent study QR Code scanners are likely to be young males.
Trends
One of the more popular marketing trends is the QR Code. Invented by the manufacturing
industry we see the QR Codes popping up everywhere. The fol- lowing is a report on a recent sur- vey of users/customers. As with any technology or product it is im- portant to understand the useful- ness and the impact on your busi- ness and $$$.
Although men and women report equal awareness of QR codes (77%), men who are aware of them are 75% more likely than women to have used one (28% vs. 16%) to access product infor- mtation, according to survey re- sults released in February 2012 by BrandSpark International, in association with Better Homes and Gardens. Looking at age groups, 18-34-year-olds (85%) display the highest awareness of QR codes, with 30% of those having used one. 35-49-year-olds are next, with 80% having heard of QR codes, and 23% of those respondents having used one. These findings align with
results from an August 2011 study released by comScore MobiLens, which found that a mobile user that scanned a QR code during June 2011 was more likely to be male (60.5% of code scanning audience), and skew toward ages 18-34 (53.4%).
According to the BrandSpark
survey, overall, 77% of respon- dents are aware of QR codes, and of those, 19% have used one.
MARCH 2012
Smartphone Owners Interested in Coupons
Data from the “2012 Ameri- can Shopper Study” indicates that 54% of smartphone owners are interested in using their device to download or scan coupons, while 32% would be interested in using an application that finds and categorizes mobile coupons. A significant proportion of smart- phone owners are also interested in using their devices to make or store shopping lists (46%), make instant purchases/transactions (38%), use an app that informs them about new food, beauty/ grooming, and household prod- ucts (36%), and participate in a contest or other type of promotion (34%).
In fact, only about one- quarter of the respondents expressed no interest in per- forming any of those activities.
Women More Interested in Cou- pons
Female smartphone owners are 19% more likely than their male counterparts to say they would be interested in download- ing or scanning coupons on their device (57% vs. 48%), and 55% more likely to say they would be interested in using an app that finds and categorizes mobile cou- pons (34% vs. 22%). Additionally, they are more interested in making instant purchases/transactions on their devices (39% vs. 29%).
Youth More Curious, Too Breaking down the data by age groups, 18-34-year- olds (66%) are the most likely to be interested in downloading or scanning coupons, ahead of 35-49-year-olds (48%), and those over 50 (43%). The groups fall in the same order of preference when it comes to interest in using an app that finds and categorizes mobile coupons (35%, 28%, and 25%, respectively), and making instant purchases/transactions on their device (43%, 33%, and 28%, respectively).
www.marketingcharts.com
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