Penguin and digital agency Dare have produced a new iPhone and iPad app for Stephen Fry’s autobiography but in keeping with one of the most internet-savvy of celebrities, this is no ordinary book app. Read more »

Location services and data visualisation have to be a marriage made in heaven. Startups are beginning to take advantage of APIs and the accumulation of user data on services like Foursquare to launch new geo apps and create some interesting and potentially very useful visualisations. A brand new application, called WeePlaces.com, can show you a history of your check-ins, representing these spots in a slick visualisation incorporating a map and a timeline, and making it easier to see trends in the data over time. Read more »

Techcrunch reported over the weekend that Google has ‘quietly’ invested between $100-$200m in social gaming business Zynga, noting that Zynga’s product portfolio would give Google a solid base of games on which to launch Google Games later this year, as well as the potential to build the coveted social graph, and an excellent platform from which to provide a boost for Google Checkout. Read more »

Another first for Foursquare – The Huffington Post and the Independent Film Channel (IFC) have launched campaigns to add their own ‘layers’ to the location service. Read more »

According to PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Global Entertainment and Media Outlook (2010 to 2014) another milestone is about to be passed with the internet poised to overtake newspapers as the second-largest U.S. advertising medium by revenue behind television. Contrast that with some bleak but revealing figures from the OECD report on The Evolution Of News And The Internet, which tells us that since 2007 the UK has seen one of the heaviest global newspaper circulation declines at 25%, second only to the US at 30%. Read more »

Another killer presentation from Mary Meeker, Morgan Stanley analyst and so called “Queen of the Net” who, at the CM Summit in New York a few days ago, gave another typically data-heavy but hugely insightful overview of the rapidly changing face of the internet. Read more »

If McKinsey have it right, the real game changer in the networked world we now live in is the sheer volume of information available today, that “has dramatically altered the balance of power between companies and consumers”. Read more »

It’s interesting that at the same time that questions are being asked about how far Facebook has shifted in its treatment of user data and about the complexity of their privacy settings, a new start-up by four NYU computer science students designed to decentralise the social web and put users back in control of their personal data is getting some serious attention from investors. Read more »

Spotify has announced its next step toward digital music streaming domination with a major upgrade that includes some brand new social features that have got a lot of people very excited.

The service now allows you to connect it to your Facebook account, pull in your friends who are also on Spotify, and generate a  profile that includes your favourite tracks, artists and your playlists. Read more »

You’ve no doubt heard it before that location is the next big thing. It’s about to get much bigger. With Facebook about to announce new location-based features at their developer conference late this month, location is about to take a giant leap forward.

Combine that with talk of a Foursquare sale, and the growing list of companies (FT and Starbucks being only the most well-known)  starting to use Foursquare check-ins as a whole new form of promotional CRM, and this space is rapidly becoming a hot-bed of focus and innovation. Read more »