The Wall Blog » Neil Perkin

Stephen Fry, The Autobiography, and an app with a difference

Neil Perkin — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 10:25:53 +0000

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. Described as a “bold and beautiful, innovative and thoroughly fun way to explore The Fry Chronicles”, the MyFry app allows you to read the book in a non-linear fashion, dipping in and out of content that you want to read through a smart use of content-tagging and visualisation to create a ‘visual index’.

With increasing numbers of people consuming long-form content via screens, publishers have been rushing to create applications to capitalise on the opportunity, and the number of books available on the iTunes App Store passed the number of games for the first time back in March this year.

Foursquare Goes Visual

Neil Perkin — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 08:55:22 +0000

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. Simply log-in to Foursquare via the site, and you can watch as you zip around town, or look at some of the 10,000 visualisations that have already been created, including one from Naveen Selvadurai, Co-Founder of FourSquare.

Google buys into social gaming with $200m investment in Zynga

Neil Perkin — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 08:21:56 +0000

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.

Location Layering Begins On Foursquare

Neil Perkin — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 08:41:31 +0000

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.

It follows Foursquare promising last week that with its new round of funding there would be big things happening in the next 12 months.

The Evolution Of News and the Internet

Neil Perkin — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 12:37:58 +0000

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%.

Morgan Stanley Internet Trends 2010

Neil Perkin — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 08:38:26 +0000

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.

Start-up Paper.li offers solution to managing mountain of social links

Neil Perkin — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 11:51:33 +0000

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”.

Diaspora – Dawn Of The Anti-Facebook?

Neil Perkin — Mon, 17 May 2010 08:23:57 +0000

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.

Music gets even more social as Spotify adds features

Neil Perkin — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 14:43:43 +0000

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.

Location Based Social Media – The Next Battleground?

Neil Perkin — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 11:04:59 +0000

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.