February 2012
5 posts
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AD AGENCIES STRUGGING TO EVOLVE IN DIGITAL AGE
Clearly, there are many new challenges in the agency business relative to client/agency relationship management, account servicing, performance measurement, and accountability. In addition, a great deal of new contenders are keen to displace ad agencies in taking a strategic leadership role by helping global marketers embrace integrated, multi-channel digital marketing practices that blend both...
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How To Create A Triple-Threat Content Strategy...
Written by Lexi Lewtan a blogger in New York City for the Content Strategist.
Any brand with a decent digital strategy is currently interacting with readers on a couple different digital platforms.
But while certain updates, like newsletters, work independently, there are other platforms that work beautifully in tandem. Instead of updating these accounts in isolation, each interaction helps...
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Retailers Shut Facebook Storefonts Amid Apathy
Excerpted from Bloomberg By Ashley Lutz - Feb 17, 2012 12:00 AM ET
Last April, Gamestop Corp. (GME) opened a store on Facebook to generate sales among the 3.5 million-plus customers who’d declared themselves “fans” of the video game retailer. Six months later, the store was quietly shuttered.
Gamestop has company. Over the past year, Gap Inc., J.C. Penney (JCP) Co. and Nordstrom...
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Ogilvy & Mather Staffs Up in Social Media and...
By STUART ELLIOTT for the New York Times February 13, 2012, 9:00 AM
One of the biggest advertising agencies, Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide, is starting practice units that are devoted to helping clients navigate two areas that are rewarding but confusing: social media and youth marketing.
Ogilvy & Mather, which is part of WPP, the world’s largest ad-agency holding company, is to announce...
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How Americans Use Their Phones to Assist With...
Image : DiverseImages
More than half of adult cell phone owners used their cell phones while they were in a store during the 2011 holiday season to seek help with purchasing decisions. During a 30 day period before and after Christmas:
38% of cell owners used their phone to call a friend while they were in a store for advice about a purchase they were considering making
24% of cell...
January 2012
21 posts
7 tags
Brands Want Content Curator Jobs
Digital media has emboldened many brands to consider themselves publishers. After all, American Express has credibility on financial matters and Coke has a network 36 million Facebook fans. Who needs publishers to serve as intermediaries?
The problem is publishing is a lot harder than it looks, or rather it’s a lot harder to do it with the consistency, day after day, that’s needed to build a...
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Tweets still must flow. Maybe.
Twitter announces a new policy in a statement published on their blog, below, whereby they can withhold tweets in markets that a local government may deem its content to be offensive. Seems like a slippery slope for a social networking system that prides itself in being an open free flowing source of information, entertainment and the freedom of speech for all…
Thursday, January 26,...
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Tablets: the perfect shopping device
Modern tablets have only been on the market for less than two years, but they have quickly become potent shopping tools that generate an outsized effect on online commerce. Last year was the year that the tablet became an online retailer’s best friend as it emerged as the preferred device for many shoppers to make their purchases.
The latest data came earlier this week from Adobe Digital...
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Home Depot looks to Silicon Valley for growth
Home Depot’s history of acquisitions has run toward building products companies and home services, not Silicon Valley start-ups. But the home improvement retailer is showing that it is trying to be more innovative and forward-thinking with the purchase of online home services marketplace Redbeacon.
The deal though shows that big retailers are increasingly looking toward Silicon Valley for ideas...
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Google's Response To Censorship: End Piracy, Not...
Millions of Americans oppose SOPA and PIPA because these bills would censor the Internet and slow economic growth in the U.S.
Two bills before Congress, known as the Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House, would censor the Web and impose harmful regulations on American business. Millions of Internet users and entrepreneurs already oppose SOPA and...
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15 Reasons Why Twitter is #Winning
“Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.” - Oscar Wilde
1) Anonymity is still desired by web users. Twitter allows you to be yourself or whomever you want to be. True to the original roots of the Internet.
2) Easy sign up process. User Name and login is all you need to get started
3) Fewer design choices which helps a...
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iPhone Now Officially The World's Most Popular...
As early as last summer, the iPhone laid claim to having become the world’s most popular camera, when it transpired that more of the photos on picture sharing site Flickr were taken on one of Apple’s devices than on any single “proper” camera.
Because the camera does not lie, we now have hard data to illustrate this trend. Sales of mass market, budget digital cameras are in freefall. In the UK,...
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App Taps Your Twitter Network to Find You A Job
The infographic PSFK featured last month demonstrated the high likelihood of landing a job via social media sites. Nearly 8 million Americans claimed that Twitter got them their current job. A new web app called WorkFu has caught onto this and plans to tap into your Twitter connections to help you find jobs that are relevant to you. Each opportunity is given a relevance percentage rating and...
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eBay CEO, John Donahoe: “eBay Mobile GMV will...
John Donahoe, eBay CEO, announced that eBay is projecting 2012 global mobile gross merchandise volume (GMV) to surpass $8 billion. PayPal projects that its global mobile total payment volume (TPV) will be $7 billion in 2012.
“Mobile plays a significant role in how eBay Inc. is enabling commerce and using technology to connect consumers and provide new ways for them to shop when, where and how...
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Visa Reveals payWave-Compatible NFC Smartphone...
Trying to keep track of the current state of mobile payments via NFC on smartphones can be enough to drive you nuts. What should be a thriving development community is instead hampered by restrictions largely imposed by carriers. While they’ve hemmed and hawed about compatibility issues (and a cynical mind might just think they’re desperate to monetize the feature), we’ve seen...
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Texting Profits at Risk as Users Look Elsewhere
IMAGE: DI
SMS — short message service — is no longer all the rage, but it still generates an estimated 12 percent of service revenue for U.S. operators.
Now, with many consumers turning to low-cost alternatives like iMessenger, BlackBerry Messenger and Facebook’s mobile messaging service, operators like Verizon Wireless, AT&T Inc and Sprint Nextel risk losing a steady,...
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Codecademy : A Fun Simple Way to Learn Computer...
Mayor Mike Bloomberg says his New Year’s resolution is to learn to be a programmer. At least, that’s what the outspoken CEO of New York tweeted to his 208,000-odd followers on Thursday.
“My New Year’s resolution is to learn to code with Codecademy in 2012!” he (or one of his handlers) wrote.
Codecademy was created out of the frustrations Zach and Ryan felt with learning how to program. Tired...
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Global Social : US And EU Mature, Emerging Markets...
Last month George Colony, CEO of Forrester, talked about a “Social Thunderstorm” at the LeWeb conference in Paris .
In the six years that Forrester has been collecting data, a lot has changed in the world of social media. Social networking has morphed into a global phenomenon. Today, 86% of online US adults and 79% of European online adults engage with social media. And consumers in emerging...
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Text Message Economics Boosts Farmer Income In...
IMAGE: FLICKR USER CIAT
The story behind Intuit Fasal, a free SMS-based service that provides rural farmers with real-time price information, which has blossomed into a program with more than 500,000 users and huge effects on the lives of Indian farmers.
“How can technology help the places I grew up in?”
That’s Deepa Bachu, describing her personal mission. Bachu was born in...
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A Tweeting Cabbie's Growing Business
Temuri checking his Twitter and texts for new bookings
By Jacqui Cheng | special to arstechnica
“Can you pick me up at my place in 15 minutes? Text me when you get here.” No, this isn’t a text message to a friend or a call to a car service—it’s a direct message sent through Twitter to a driver of a Chicago cab. Rashid Temuri, who goes by “Chicago Cabbie”...
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Students' Lives are Mobile and Social
Click to enlarge the infographic
Surveys show students want learning and schools to follow suit.
The challenge:
How can schools harness this social force for learning while attending to some persistent concerns?
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TV Ads' New Digital Role
Television advertising has undergone significant changes in the last 30 years. However, it is arguably on the verge of its greatest changes ever…
—The value we put on an advertisement will change as we seek to account for engagement metrics in the pricing.
—The narrative arch will change as we think of the advertisement as a trailer versus the whole story.
...
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12 predictions for Africa Tech Scene in 2012
It has been a banner year for the Africa technology scene as the world begins to turn to the continent – The Economist Africa rising cover story article was for many, a big validation in the future opportunities as well as challenges for Africa.
Here is a list of 12 predictions compiled by Mbwana Alliy for Afrinnovator
1) Feature phone to Smartphone + a touch of Tablet: Smartphone adoption will...
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Travel Marketing Pros Plan to Increase Mobile...
According to an annual survey, travel marketing pros plan to increase their mobile efforts in 2012. This study included airlines, agents, tour operators, hotels, tourist boards, car rental, rail, travel insurance, publishing and cruise companies. It found that, while 20% of travel companies will keep mobile spending the same, 54% will be raising the bar. Here are some additional quick stats from...
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Mobile Technology Leads to Better Customer...
Motorola Solutions Survey shows 67% of shoppers agree emerging in-store technologies heighten overall satisfaction.
The rising availability of shopping-assisted options across all shopping channels has raised customer service expectations for shoppers and retail associates. According to the survey, more than eight in 10 (83.3%) surveyed retail associates and managers believe that shoppers can...
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Technology 2012: Four tech trends to watch
By Tracey Wilen-Daugenti, Special to the Christian Science Monitor
Technological innovations lay at the heart of many of last year’s biggest stories — from citizen-recorded videos that fanned the flames of the Arab Spring to the social-media organized Occupy movement. So what new technologies – and unexpected uses of them – will change social habits and relationships this year?...
December 2011
15 posts
3 tags
Dozens of Places to Educate Yourself Online
All education is self-education. Period. It doesn’t matter if you’re sitting in a college classroom or a coffee shop. We don’t learn anything we don’t want to learn.
Those people who take the time and initiative to pursue knowledge on their own are the only ones who earn a real education in this world. Take a look at any widely acclaimed scholar, entrepreneur or historical figure you can...
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Anonymity, Content Management and Zero Footprint...
Key Ideas
Anonymity
At a recent talk at the Web 2.0 Summit, 4chan founder Christopher Poole (aka “moot”) explains how Google and Facebook “do identity wrong,” and that people should not be tied to just one identity on the web.
Poole explains, to some people, he’s a son, and to others he’s a hacker or a friend. Identity is more complex than the world’s largest social networks would like you to...
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Technology Patents: Useful and Ridiculous
By Hugh Langley for The Telegraph
Google is under fire for alleged patent infringement in its Android mobile operating system. Intellectual property is a vexed issue in technology, with empire built on some innovations, and some laughable attempts to restrict rivals from implementing trivial features.
Useful patents
PageRank
Named after its co-developer, Larry Page, PageRank is the...
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Japanese Firms, DOCOMO, KDDI and SOFTBANK...
Mobile payments are nothing new to the people of Japan, who’ve used NTT DoCoMo’s Osaifu-Keitai as the de facto standard for years. Based on Sony’s FeliCa smart card, the system is incompatible with the NFC Type A and B technologies that are spreading across the globe. Hence, there’s a growing concern for interoperability in the Land of the Rising Sun, prompting NTT...
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Volkswagen turns off Blackberry email after work...
Volkswagen has agreed to stop its Blackberry servers sending emails to some of its employees when they are off-shift.
The carmaker confirmed it made the move earlier this year following complaints that staff’s work and home lives were becoming blurred.
The restriction covers employees in Germany working under trade union negotiated contracts.
Campaigners warned that the move would not be...
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General Mills Accelerates Digital Marketing...
MINNEAPOLIS, Minn. - General Mills is expanding its successful General Mills Worldwide Innovation Network (G-WIN) open innovation program to include emerging digital marketing technologies with the launch of G-WIN Digital. Through G-WIN Digital, the company seeks to connect with partners who have digital marketing technologies focusing on video, social, mobile and gaming.
“From the Betty...
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Two Things Every Great Mobile App Must Have
remotelymobile:
What makes a great app? To be more specific – what makes a really great mobile app? As I have written in some of my previous posts there are unique challenges with mobility in terms of form factor (which is just a fancy way of saying device size) and what it means to be productive. These challenges are not always accounted for. Many mobile app designs suffer from poor layouts,...
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How Instagram can gain users, make money and keep...
digithoughts:
Instagram; You can start making serious money today without upsetting your users and at the same time massively increase your user base. Here’s how: Instagram is an iOS only, superb photo sharing app. It’s easy, quick and fun to snap a picture and share it. The filters and the forced square photo format makes photos more interesting and appealing than they really deserve to. I...
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mHealth: Closing the Gap Between Promise and...
Stakeholders at last week’s third annual mHealth Summit in the Washington, D.C., area touted the potential of mobile health technology to improve health care quality, increase patient centeredness and reduce costs. However, they also acknowledged that while mobile tools have helped revolutionize nearly every other industry in the U.S., the health care field has lagged behind. HHS Secretary...
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Mobile Passes Print in Time-Spent Among US Adults
NEW YORK (December 12, 2011)—US adults now spend more time on mobile devices each day than they do with print media, according to a new forecast by eMarketer. Meanwhile, time spent watching traditional TV—whether live or recorded on a DVR or DVD—is also increasing, despite industry fears of online encroachment and consumer “cord-cutting.”
The average adult consumer has spent 4 hours and 34...
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How Twitter Proves That Place Matters
By Richard Florida for the Atlantic
Twitter is a fascinating place to explore not just the connectedness of people but of places. In a previous post, I mapped the locations of the 500 leading “Twitterati.” When it comes to celebrities, the Twitterverse is still overwhelmingly American: almost three quarters of them are located in the United States. Los Angeles, with its large...
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WatchAmericans and Mobile Computing: Key Trends in Consumer Research
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Watch
Email Evolved: Free unlimited email aliases to help counter spam
Ian Clarke is a Computer Scientist and Entrepreneur, with a track record of both technical and business innovation, and an outspoken thinker and activist on issues relating to freedom of speech, intellectual property law, and technology. The Irish born original designer and lead developer of Freenet continues his mission to keep...
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Yes, Even iPhones Can Spy on You, Too
By ADAM CLARK ESTES for the Atlantic Wire
An Apple hacker has discovered that Carrier IQ, the shady smartphone software recently found to be logging keystrokes on Android and BlackBerry devices, is also installed on the iPhone. Don’t worry, fanboys. It’s off by default — probably. After
As on other smartphones, the presence of Carrier IQ in Apple’s iOS firmware is...
November 2011
9 posts
4 tags
Americans and Their Cell Phones
by Aaron Smith for the Pew Internet and American Life Project
Mobile phones have become a near-ubiquitous tool for information seeking and communicating—83% of American adults own some kind of cell phone.
Cell phones can help stave off boredom – 42% of cell owners used their phone for entertainment when they were bored.
Despite their advantages, some cell phone owners just need an...
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Say No to the Stop Online Piracy Act
by JEFFREY ZELDMAN via Alistapart.com
United States H.R.3261 AKA the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), an ill-conceived lobbyist-driven piece of legislation that is technically impossible to enforce, cripplingly burdensome to support, and would, without hyperbole, destroy the internet as we know it.
We at ALA are not alone in our opposition to SOPA. Other opponents of the bill now before the U.S....
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The Future of Learning: Stanford's Free Online...
This fall, Stanford decided to experiment by offering its three most popular computer science classes to the public—for free. Within weeks, 200,000 people from around the globe signed up, with Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, taught by renowned Stanford professors Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun (pictured above), attracting a whopping 160,000 students.
Norvig’s tracking found that more...
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Holiday Retailing Frenzy: How IBM Spots the...
by Steve Hamm for A Smarter Planet
When it comes to mobile shopping this holiday season, there will be no place for the makers of smartphones and tablet computers to hide. Analysts will be able to detect not just the brand of the device from which a consumer forays to retailing Web sites; they’ll know what model each shopper is using.
This bit of intelligence comes from John Squire, chief...
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Trending Tech In The Workplace
by @jebory via Tech.li
The ubiquitous nature of smartphone and tablets is driving behavioral changes at an unprecedented pace. We are trending towards using one device for everything (see the Kleiner Perkins graph below). And the device needs to move seamlessly back and forth between work, home life, leisure activities, and everything else that we do on a daily basis. This trend is impacting...
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The Rapid Rise of Social Blogging
by Lauren Hockenson
In four short years, Tumblr has grown from relative obscurity to start-up darling to international microblogging network. The platform has grown a staggering 900% in the past year and eclipsed platform competitor WordPress, largely due to its global reach and brand-building potential.
Those under Tumblr’s influence are fiercely loyal — with 2% of users making up 43% of total...
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Building a Mobile App Is Not a Mobile Strategy
by Jason Gurwin originally published in the Harvard Business Review
Everyone wants their own mobile application. In the last year, I have heard this consistently. In fact, mobile analytics firm Distimo claims 91 of the top 100 brands have their own mobile app (up from 51 just 18 months ago).
On the surface this sounds great, right? I can use my big brand name to get people to install my...
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Your digitalDNA™: Be Forewarned and be Forearmed
Beware, digitalDNA™ is much more permanent than your biological DNA
by Chi Modu
I originally wanted to title this piece, Protect Your digitalDNA™, but I soon realized that this is even more difficult than protecting your personal DNA. When law enforcement wants to acquire a sample of your DNA to prove your guilt or innocence in a case, they still need to get a judge to issue a subpoena in...