The new Kindle 3G ebook reader has become’s Amazon’s best-selling product ever. They haven’t released the figures yet but say it has overtaken Harry Potter and the Deathly Halllows, which saw 1 million pre-orders when it was released in 2007.

First going on sale at the end of August 2010, the Kindle 3G should make sales of 8 million by the end of the year, a figure which will not go unnoticed by Apple, whose iPad has sold 12 million since its release back in March.

If you got one for Christmas you’ve probably been discussing its merits with relatives and friends.

Half of them will be impressed by the opportunity to store up to 3,500 books in one small tablet and read them on a screen without straining your eyes; the other half will wave a well-thumbed novel in your face and shout about the death of publishing and say there’s nowt wrong with a real book with pages you can turn with your fingers. Read More »

For Eleven for 2011: The social media trends coming your way I spoke to industry insiders and asked them to look into their crystal balls and predict the big social media trends for the coming year.

I also asked them about the people they think will make a big impact on social media in 2011 – the innovators, the thinkers, the entrepreneurs. Here are some of their hot tips.

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AOL has purchased four-month-old Silicon Valley start-up About.me just four days after launch.

What does About.me offer?
The site allows users to create an attractive splash page pulling together information from social sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr and Twitter. There’s also a personal analytics dashboard so you can track how many people are looking at your profile and where they come from.

The concept taps into an increasing desire to have more control over our online profile and present it in a more appealing way than platforms like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, with their limited design options, allow. Read More »

2010 has definitely been a great year for brands going viral. After a relatively slow start to year with only the Old Spice campaign adding any spice to the digital marketing sphere, things hotted up around the World Cup with Nike’s Write the Future campaign and then continued strongly throughout the rest of the year peaking with DC Shoe’s Gymkhana series. Read More »

2010 has seen a massive expansion in the use of social media by people and brands. There’s no denying that a lot of it is celebrity led – just look at @ladygaga with her 7.3 million  Twitter followers – but major brands have been pushing it forward too, creating platforms on Facebook alongside their official websites or running location-based campaigns through Foursquare and its competitors.

The increased use of smartphones and steady stream of new applications have enabled us to access our favourite platforms wherever we are, to the point that social media has become integrated with our daily lives in a way that would have been unimaginable a few years ago. Read More »

Call me a nevous Nellie, but if my company had recently been subject to a series of protests and criticism about its tax arrangements, would I set up a website that allowed users of a social network where much of the criticism is spread to let their uncensored thoughts appear in a live feed?

Made Me Smile: tweeters mocked Vodafone via hashtag competition

Obviously not. But that’s exactly what Vodafone did over the weekend on Twitter.

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A recent report from Deloitte predicts that consumers will spend $852bn over the festive season; yet only $32 billion of this is expected to be spent online.

It has been suggested that by creating a ‘browsing experience’ online for consumers’ etailers will increase their traffic and tempt shoppers towards buying good. The internet is vast, which can make it difficult for brands to be noticed. Etailers need to identify who their target audience is online and ensure that they are reaching them at the right time and in the right way to improve their visibility. Read More »

A few months ago I moved from Bristol to the Peak district town of Buxton, where I now work from home most of the time. The snow here has remained solid for well over a week, and as temperature increased to over 0 Celsius for the first time today and the snow started to melt, I noticed some interesting things:

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A new infographic by Vincenzo Cosenza showing the world map of social networks shows how Facebook’s market dominance shows no sign of slowing down. With 500 million users and counting, it is now the market leader in 115 out of 132 countries.

Using data from Alexa and Google Trends for Websites traffic data (December 2010) the map shows the most popular social networks by country, the fourth in a series of infographics produced every six months which trace the increasing global reach of the California-based social network.

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Social TV will be a major opportunity for TV companies and brand owners over the year ahead. Its potential is neatly underlined by the finale of The X Factor which will generate not peak levels not just of viewing and ad revenue for ITV but unprecedented amounts of live online chat between fans during the show. Read More »