FPS Russia is a huge YouTube channel. It has over 3.5 million subscribers and has generated more than 500,000,000 video views. Gawker says it is the site’s third most popular channel.

Sadly, 32-year old Keith Ratliff, a producer on the American show, was found dead at the start of the year. He had been killed by a single bullet to the back of the head. It looks like an execution. Police have ruled out a burglary gone wrong since nothing was taken from the scene.

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The iconic video games firm Atari has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The firm, which was formerly known as Infogrames Entertainment, bought the Atari name more than a decade ago from its American-owners.

The Atari name first came to prominence 30 years ago when it launched the first videogame, ‘Pong’. Later, it introduced children to what are now cult classics — ‘Space Invaders’, ‘Missile Command’ and ‘Asteroids’. Read More »

I was very interested to read Simon Pitman’s article “Adapt or Die”, which discussed how the financial sector has been relatively slow on the uptake of social media.  While I agree with Simon on a number of the points that he made, I feel that there is a strong case to argue that not only has the financial sector embraced social media already, but it has actually been innovative within it.

I work for a spread betting and CFD company and part of my remit is formulating the company’s social media strategies.  To add to some of the restrictions that Simon mentioned in his article, one of the most common complaints I get for this industry is that it is simply too “boring” to make an impact in social media.  Frankly, this is just a myth; in the same sense that saying compliance regulations constrict social media usage is just an excuse not to use it. Read More »

As Blackberry gets ready to launch its long awaited Blackberry 10 (BB10) operating system, which is being rumoured to launch next week with the future of Research in Motion’s riding on it, Samsung has taken a potshot at it in this new ad. The Samsung ad makes a play to establish its phones as not only being for consumers, but for business users as well. In the spot we get to see a couple of Blackberry users who are made fun of and portrayed as older, decidedly uncool, and clinging to their devices and old fashion ways.  The message is clear: the cool kids have Samsung devices (and a love of unicorns) and they use them for both work and play. Read More »

Instagram is the darling of tech, and the king of all photo apps. It made its founders millions of dollars, and made each of us into top artistic photographers with just our iPhone.

Or so the story goes.

What that simplistic narrative ignores though is that Instagram is being pushed very hard indeed, and its competitor is not another Silicon Valley darling, but  a European start-up called EyeEm.

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