Around the Office: Facebook/WordPress integration, real-life e-commerce, more

Brent likes the idea of bringing e-commerce into the real world. It’s not science fiction! The Korean division of Tesco supermarkets made it possible to go shopping on a subway platform using a mobile phone. They put full-scale images of their aisles and cellphone scan-able QR codes in the subway, letting commuters browse and scan the items want to buy as the wait for their train. Once they’ve filled their virtual shopping cart, they can purchase the items and have them delivered for when they get home. Going to a shop sounds downright tiresome in comparison.Roberto knows some ways to make Facebook and WordPress work together. For instance, you can link your WordPress blog and your Facebook account to automatically show your followers every new post when they sign into Facebook. You can also configure Facebook to record social analytics for your WordPress site, giving you insight into user engagement and demographics on the Facebook network. Using Facebook in conjunction with a WordPress site can help reinforce its impact.

Eva found a new online application this week that extracts colors from images. Whats Its Color not only does it find the primary and complementary dominant colors, but it also finds visually unique colors in an image. This application can be extremely useful for creating a design around an image.

We love getting feedback from the people around us, and that’s one of the reasons we liked how Heidi Cool crowdsourced the focus of a WordPress talk she was presenting. By asking for input on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook, she was able to get some topic suggestions and valuable advice. Relying on the crowd to make decisions isn’t always the best idea (for instance, would you only listen to music from the current top 40 charts?) but asking for crowd input can give you a great place to start. According to feedback after the presentation, she, in fact, did come up with a relevant and useful presentation by first asking what people wanted.