Global Nerdy

The most recent report released by Pew Internet Research, The Rise of In-Store Mobile Commerce, revealed that 50 percent of shoppers used their smartphones to research purchase decisions over the holidays. Of note were the following statistics:

• 38% of those surveyed used their smartphones to make a voice call while shopping in a store to ask about a product.
• 25% used their smartphones to do price comparisons; they were comparing the price of an item in stores to prices for the same item in online shops.
• 24% used their smartphones to research the products they were shopping for online. I do this all the time at shops. It’s how I picked out my current camera, the Canon ELPH 300HS.

“You can’t win the web without winning mobile,” I told my manager’s manager back when I was at Microsoft (and that’s how I became the Windows Phone Guy on Microsoft Canada’s Developer and Platform Evangelism team). Now that I’m at Shopify, I’m still waving the mobile flag: you can’t win at ecommerce without winning at mobile. And as of today, we’re a good deal closer to winning.

Shopify has just announced that it has acquired Select Start Studios, an award-winning mobile development company based in Ottawa with over 35 apps in Apple’s App Store and the Android Market. This acquisition brings over 20 new people and a helluva lot of mobile app skills and brainpower into the Shopifold.

[Update: Here’s TechCrunch’s coverage, and here’s Mashable’s.]

Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke has this to say: “The S3 acquisition brings in top talent that will rapidly deliver on our mobile strategy, and produce several new mobile product offerings this year.”

Tariq Zaid, Select Start’s cofounder and CEO, says “We’re thrilled to be joining Shopify to execute on the company’s mobile initiative. Their focus on mobile, deep understanding of technology, and overall culture make this a natural fit. We’re already cooking up some really exciting innovations that show just how game changing mcommerce will be.”

Welcome aboard, Select Start! I’m looking forward to working with you guys.

Select Start were in the process of building a mobile app for our friends at Toronto-based startup FreshBooks, so technically, they’re now clients of ours. In response they sent us this lovely “horse head in the bed cake” inspired by that classic scene from The Godfather. The message that came with the cake reads: “Nice selection for the start of 2012…you bastard!”

Here’s an interesting observation made by Adam McNamara: Shopify was once based at 185 Rideau Street in Ottawa, and that’s where Select Start were based until they joined us. That’s an office with killer startup karma. The question Adam asks is: “Who’s next"?”

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

If you watched the WAT video that I pointed to in this earlier post, you saw some really counterintuitive behaviour from JavaScript and probably laughed and facepalmed at the same time.

A Stack Overflow user going by the handle of Ventero has taken it upon himself/herself to explain each of those JavaScript oddities, by way of pointing to the ECMA-262 standard. If you were scratching your head trying to figure out why those JavaScript statements were full of WAT, your answers are there!

This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.

Creative Commons photo by paul (dex). Click to see the original.

HackDays — the gatherings that bring together Canada’s brightest geeks to build projects in a single day — kicks off 2012 with a session in Toronto on Saturday, February 12th. This one’s an interesting one, as it’s a part of the extended Social Media Week, the global multi-city conference taking place from February 13th through 17th. Here’s a quick explanation of what Social Media Week, and this year’s theme, Empowering Change Through Collaboration, are all about:

In keeping with the idea behind Social Media Week and HackDays’ spirit of building stuff with readily-available APIs, the theme of this Toronto HackDay is “Apps for Good”. Take the APIs — including Shopify’s ecommerce API — to build applications that can change the world around us for the better. You’ll have a day to do it, and the best apps, as determined by a panel of judges, will be awarded prizes (the prizes are usually pretty sweet: we’ve handed out MacBook Airs and iPads to the winners).

Shopify will be there! More specifically, I’ll be there, representing Shopify, along with some other Shopifolks, to help run the event, help participants with the Shopify API and generally provide moral support to everyone there. We’ll also be sponsoring the event and providing a prize for the best use of our API.

If you’re looking to take on a hacking challenge and put your skills to the test, meet your fellow geeks and build an app for the greater good, HackDays Toronto is for you! Sign up here (registration is free for hackers building apps), and do it soon — space is limited!

This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.