Christmas comes early for Linkcious merchants!

Speed has always been at the top of our collective minds and since two weeks ago, we have starting testing serving all your images and other assets through CDNs. We are happy to announce today that we have started doing this full scale and we are offering this to all our users at no additional charge. This includes our free users too! (Arn’t we cool?)

This increases our expenses but I don’t care. Our aim to to make Linkcious:

1) Powerful, help our merchants make more money
2) Easy to use
2) Fast

For the uninitiated, a content delivery network or content distribution network (CDN) is a large distributed system of servers deployed in multiple data centres across the Internet. The goal of a CDN is to serve content to end-users with high availability and high performance.

Merry Christmas everyone!

Ok happy to announce that we launched two quick improvements (pardon the pun) that will result in huge performance gains in the loading speed of the Linkcious widget.

1. We removed the pre-loaders for all paid accounts. This is a very popular request and we have finally agreed that no pre loaders is the right way forward. There is really no reason to bring visitors’ attention to the empty space before Linkcious loads.
2. Separately, by reducing CURL commands, we managed to improve the loading speed of the widget by 80%. Now, Linkcious load really fast (natively).

Linkcious is an easy way to turn your online shop’s products into ads smartly. Signup here.

“Linkcious offers users a product recommendation widget which users can embed onto their websites. It allows online retailers to save thousands of dollars in development costs and drastically shorten deployment time.”

In case you missed it, this is Linkcious’ feature on Techinasia.

This is really awesome! Found out that Linkcious has been recently mentioned on Forbes. Check out the entire article here. Recommendation Engines: The Reason Why We Love Big Data

Starting today, we have roll out our new logo. Check it out above.

I think Linkcious is really easy to install. I mean, how difficult can it be? The steps: 1) Customise the layout, 2) Click on “Get Code”, 3) Stick the code onto pages where the you want your related products to show.

I don’t remember our first user or the second or the 105th but I know only 10% successfully install our widget. Encouragingly, users who have successfully installed Linkcious do not uninstall; they keep on using in almost perpetuity. However, not many users are able to successfully install.

Our successful install rate is much higher recently but still nothing near what we except. Hopefully Zopim chat will help us understand the problems users are facing during installation.

For the uninitiated, Zopim is a a live chat web widget. It claims that web owners can chat with visitors in real-time.

We are happy to announce that we have received funding from the Media Development Authority of Singapore under the i.JAM scheme today.

Linkcious.com is an intuitive product recommendation widget. It is currently the easiest solution available in the market for an Ecommerce merchant to get the highly coveted Amazon-like product recommendation widget without spending a bomb on programming fees. Linkcious is customizable and integrates seamlessly onto Ecommerce stores and blogs.

This investment will primarily help fuel the Company’s product development.

Using Linkcious product recommendations results in a dramatic increase in visitor engagement, content relevancy and revenue, whilst adding a cost saving opportunity at the same time.

To signup at Linkcious as a beta user, visit: http://linkcious.com.

 

A little update on Linkcious since I have not blogged for a while as the November, December months were very busy for us (we needed to fulfill large orders during Christmas for our E-commerce channels) and we were collecting click data from the alpha users of Linkcious.

Things are proceeding well and we will be doing A/B testing on different probability distributions to select relevant products to show up as Linkcious links next week. I will elaborate on that on a separate post.

One final note: We have only accepted just 200 users and have not sent out any new invites since October 2012. So stay tune if you have not receive our invites!

Finally, we have started our Linkcious blog.  Inspired by The Big Bang Theory and the fact that we think of ourselves as smart, geeky physicists smart quirky programmers, we want to dent the universe. The first step is to blog on our views about design, marketing, e-commerce, experience, simplicity, the web, user interfaces and the world.