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To marketers, the prospect of reaching shoppers through their smartphones is tantalizing. But mobile doesn't always mean on the go. New data show that 68% of consumers' smartphone use happens at home. And users' most common activity is not shopping or socializing but engaging in what researchers call "me time." The 7 Primary Motivations for Cell Usage: 46% - "Me Time" 19% - Socializing 12 % - Shopping 11% - Accomplishing 7% - Preparation 4% - Discovery 1% - Self-Expression
On the second day of 2013, WhatsApp tweeted that it had reached a new milestone: 7 billion inbound messages a day. This happened little more than four months after August 23, when WhatsApp had reached 4 billion inbound messages a day. 75% volume growth since August 23 would translate to roughly 500% annualized volume growth.
WhatsApp is benefiting from the global clash of BlackBerry, Android and iPhone camps, because it offers a cross-platform messaging solution. On January 1, 2010, WhatsApp was a top-10 iPhone app in 16 countries across the world; a year later, the app had hit the top-10 chart in 63 countries.
A month ago there was some speculation about Facebook possibly acquiring WhatsApp. In reality, the WhatsApp active user base that now likely tops 200 million combined with maintaining a torrid growth clip makes the company a tempting target for a variety of companies ranging from Google to Twitter to Amazon. Several social networking and/or messaging companies have reached 100 million users – but maintaining annualized message volume growth of 300%-plus long after hitting that mark is another matter.
Google Maps is back on the iPhone after an absence of almost four months. And it has a few things Apple Maps still lacks -- like public transit directions, Zagat listings and Google's Street View panoramas.
The wait is now, finally over. Google Maps is in Apple’s App Store, available for both the iPhone and iPad, bringing hope to those who have been having trouble getting around since the Apple mapocalypse.Google’s app, which arrived late Wednesday night, improves on the Google-powered maps app that Apple shipped included in iOS before version 6 — when Apple ditched Google to go out on its own.
Unlike Apple’s maps app, Google’s navigation feature isn’t integrated with Siri. But it’s also much less likely to direct you into the Pacific ocean.
The maps rank 214 countries according to the strength of their ties to Britain, France, Spain and Portugal respectively. The darker the blue the higher the fraction of foreign Facebook connections with the imperial power in question. (Facebook has not shared the underlying percentage data, just the ranking.) These closely correspond to countries or territories which were, whether wholly or in part, at one point under British, French, Spanish or Portuguese rule, as seen in the bottom set of maps. Australia, New Zealand and swathes of east Africa hold the strongest ties to Britain. West African Facebookers have most connections with France. Spanish-speaking Latin America is most strongly tied to Spain. Brazilians remain firmly linked to Portugal, as do people in Mozambique, Angola and Guinea-Bissau.
A list of apps structured around specific classroom goals ...
Via David Miller
The new Starbucks-Square mobile payments partnership is an opportunity for Twitter and Facebook to leverage their developing mobile ad platforms, geo-targeting features and itinerant user base into transaction gold.
Although the Starbucks-Square is more evolutionary than revolutionary, the blue chip player’s endorsement will propel mobile commerce forward, faster, and likely integrate it with social mobile dynamics already reshaping the marketplace experience. The key will be organically incorporating commerce and advertising into consumers’ routine and spontaneous activities on their mobile devices and in the physical world -- whether that’s playing a virtual game, posting a photo, texting or buying a latte.
Via Newsweek and The Daily Beast: Tweets, texts, emails, posts. New research says the Internet can make us lonely and depressed—and may even create more extreme forms of mental illness, Tony Dokoupil reports...
Via Billy Corben
Authority Provides Great SEO Opportunities “One thing that never gets mentioned with Pinterest is the search engine optimization opportunities that the social giant provides. Because of its high authority. Pinterest ranks and/or is starting to rank well within Google and other search engines. “When you create your boards on Pinterest, you are choosing a name for that board, which now becomes an actual page (URL) within the Pinterest website. For example, ‘www.pinterest.com/user/blue-navy-socks.html‘; will become the URL if you are creating a board on blue navy socks. Now, you create a whole page about blue navy socks and there is a possibility – depending on the competition for that keyword and because of Pinterest high authority value – your page you created might rank for blue navy socks!” - Pablo Palatnik, CEO at ShadesDaddy
Victoria Ransom explains how social media is becoming an essential component of marketing. Dismissing Twitter and Facebook in business is tomfoolery, she argues.
Review data that can help you determine how to sustain social media success in the long term.
Well, that was quick, following an enormous media (and social media) storm, the ban on 9-year-old Martha Payne's blog about the dinners on offer in her school has been lifted in a matter of hours.
That said, the case has raised some important talking points around social media in schools. Sharing of photos and the use of social media is often banned in schools, and often for completely valid child protection reasons. However, in a world where kids under ten years old can write blogs that attract worldwide attention, some of these rules may need a rethink.
Willing to work for free to land an internship? You might not have to work for no pay or pennies if you go for a gig at Facebook.
Couple Googled "How to Kill a Girl" minutes before strangling her.
According to police, a couple in Florida killed 19-year-old Juliana Mensch in her sleep for drug money, but not before they ran several Internet Google searches.
James Ayers, 32, and Nicole Okrzesik, 23, researched “chemicals to passout a person,” “making people faint,” “ways to kill people in their sleep,” “how to suffocate someone” and “how to poison someone” on Google just minutes before killing Juliana Mensch.
According to police, Mensch slept on the floor while the couple trawled the Internet. The duo were friends with Mensch, even getting high with her in their Fort Lauderdale home, but decided to kill and rob her for drug money, police say.
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Two California teenagers gave milkshakes [that they had laced with drugs] to one of the teen's parents to bypass a 10 p.m. Internet cut-off time, police alledge. The teens, a 15-year-old girl and a 16-year-old friend, volunteered to buy milkshakes for the parents. The Sacramento Bee reports the parents drank only about a quarter of the milkshakes because they tasted grainy. They fell asleep and woke up around 1 a.m., with hangover symptoms, but went back to sleep.
After waking up the next day suspecting they had been drugged, they went to the local police department in Rocklin, California, to take drug tests. The tests were positive and the teenagers were taken to Juvenile Hall. If they were adults, they would be facing possible prison time.
Gordon Richards, executive director of EMQ FamiliesFirst, a children's social services nonprofit organization, told the The Sacramento Bee that teens often fear being left out of "once-in-a-lifetime" events which they might experience on the Internet.
The battle lines are sharpening between Facebook and Twitter, as they fight to become the prime hub for photo sharing on the Internet.
"IT IS an epic story of warring factions in a strange and changing landscape, a tale of incursions and sieges, of plots and betrayals, of battlefield..." The sequence of doorstop fantasy novels that George R.R. Martin began with “A Game of Thrones”, and which HBO has now turned into a hit television show, provides the sort of immersive experience of an alien world that has always been popular among techies. But these days the escapism they offer may be tinged with an eldritch sense of recognition. Silicon Valley offers few dragons or direwolves, but Mr Martin’s tales of a world that has lost its king echoes the reality of today’s technology industry, where the battle lines between the four large companies seen as dominating the consumer internet—Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon—are in furious flux. The death last year of Steve Jobs, Apple’s monarch, robbed the technology world of the nearest thing that it had to royalty. But even before Jobs’s passing, tension was growing between the great powers of the web generation as the onset of mobile computing upset the previous balance of power. No one looks likely to win quickly. “There will be a lot of trench warfare,” predicts Roelof Botha of Sequoia Capital, a venture investor. And that looks likely to be great news for consumers, who will be able to choose from an ever wider range of innovative and cheap (or free) technologies. Of course, as competition increases, firms might be tempted to lock down their heartlands more tightly—or to use foul means to attack those of others. This is bringing regulators out of their lairs. “You’re starting to see an empire-strikes-back moment amongst antitrust authorities,” says Adam Thierer, a researcher at George Mason University.
The guys behind Twitter have launched a new publishing tool, touted as a means to help create and sift through content on an increasingly cluttered Internet.
“Lots of services have successfully lowered the bar for sharing information, but there’s been less progress toward raising the quality of what’s produced,” Mr. Williams says of Medium.
Medium also proposes to offer a better way to organize posts, by gathering them into “collections” that are separated according to theme. Collections can either be closed off to the public or open to contributions, with the highest rated posts most prominent at the top.
A Virginia sheriff's deputy has been fired for liking his boss's political opponent -- on Facebook. A Virginia sheriff's deputy has been fired for liking his boss's political opponent -- on Facebook. Now Daniel Ray Carter Jr. is fighting back in court, arguing that a "like" should be protected by his First Amendment right to free speech. It's a case that could settle a significant question at a time when hundreds of millions of people express themselves on Facebook, sometimes merging their personal, professional and political lives in the process. Facebook itself also has weighed in with a brief to the court, saying that a "like" for a political candidate is "the 21st-century equivalent of a front-yard campaign sign."
Infographic suggests that Don, Peggy and Pete would make less than $100,000 a year. We aren't buying it. (click above for full image)
“Apple’s first iPhone was launched commercially in the United States on June 29, 2007. Between June 2007 and June 2012, we estimate the iPhone family of models has generated US$150 billion of cumulative revenues worldwide for Apple. This is an impressive achievement and it illustrates just how popular the iPhone has become during the past five years.” According to the latest research from Strategy Analytics, Apple has generated US$150 billion of cumulative revenues for its iPhone family in the first five years since launch in June 2007. 250 billion iPhones have been shipped cumulatively worldwide.
Why You’re Struggling to Measure the Value of Social Media: In a recent report, Adobe examined the oft-discussed...
An Arkansas company you've probably never heard of knows more about you than some of your friends, Google, and even the FBI — and it's selling your data...
When you think of the surveillance state, you usually think of snoopy alphabet-soup government agencies like the FBI, IRS, DEA, NSA, or TSA, or cyber-snoops at Facebook or Google, says Natasha Singer in The New York Times. But there's a company you've probably never heard of that "peers deeper into American life," and probably knows more about you than any of those groups: Little Rock–based Acxiom Corp.
How sketchy is this?
If you're worried about Google or Facebook tracking you online, or holes in your iPhone security, this is much worse, says Gizmodo's Condliffe. We sort of knew that commercial data-miners existed, but "Acxiom operates on a terrifying scale," and it's very likely that the company has an ever-growing dossier of 1,500 data points on you, collecting and examining 50 trillion data transactions a year.
"Last night's tipoff between the Oklahoma City Thunder and the Miami Heat is a milestone for American pro sports. For the first time, a major championship is pitting two teams whose names are mass nouns rather than ordinary plurals." So besides torturing Seattle and Cleveland fans, the Heat-Thunder showdown is torturing the language. The reason the mass-noun names sounded trendy and different is that they don't fit the normal grammatical tradition of American sports. The Bulls were better than the Sonics. The Spurs were better than the Nets. But is the Heat going to beat the Thunder? Or ARE the Thunder going to beat the Heat? British English just treats all team names—mass nouns, collective nouns, singular nouns—as plurals: Arsenal are the superior side in this one. In American English, this makes you sound like a poncy rock critic: Pavement are the most important band since Wire. So what's it going to be? HEAT OUTLAST THUNDER? THUNDER BREAKS HEAT? I asked John McIntyre, the former Baltimore Sun copy chief and current language blogger, if he had any insight into handling the Finals matchup. "Though I'm not qualified to hold forth on sports, I think you're right that a plural verb with a singular team name will look odd, or at least British, to American readers. "Heat outlasts Thunder" is going to look more natural. Since a case can be made for either usage, and style rules are inherently arbitrary anyhow, I think you should pick the choice with which you are most comfortable and follow it consistently." Settled. We'll call Miami "LeBron James" and Oklahoma City "the Sonics."
Twitter ran on Sunday its first-ever TV spot during the broadcast of the 2012 Pocono 400 NASCAR race.
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