Just as we are getting to grips with animated pictures in Cinemagram, and six second clips in Twitter’s new Vine, another application appears – Snapchat. So what is it? How can we use it? And is it worth downloading?

Snapchat is currently sitting pretty at the top of the free iTunes App chart, and is apparently taking the teenage market by storm. It’s another photo based application that, put simply, allows you to take a picture that deletes itself after 10 seconds.  The recipient, nor the company servers, can ever access that picture again. Read More »

Over the past ten years iTunes has drastically changed the way we share, purchase and consume music. It has given us unrestricted and portable access to music’s extensive back catalogue and taught the masses the art of a perfect playlist. iTunes has pioneered a listening revolution.

It has liberated music and allowed the top spot to be anyone’s game. The charts are now powered by hashtags and social media movements as much as they are press and PR.   Read More »

Spotify attempts the almost impossible in its first ever series of ads that have been released onto YouTube as it tries to capture music and what it means to us in a series of dark atmospheric and largely music free ads.

The centre piece is a 90 second ad called ‘For Music’. It’s a rapturous crowd surfing journey as a man rides a sea of hands in a flickering light and with a sprinkles of rain drops as a voiceover tries to describe what music is.  Read More »

With nearly 30,000 people descending on a few blocks in Austin, Texas, SXSW may have some major problems – mainly the challenge to get into oversubscribed talks and the variable quality of the talks themselves – but with a fair few launches and innovations, being here is like stepping into the future and you can’t help but be inspired.

The new product launches are diverse and the ones that caught the zeitgeist for me yesterday include Makerbot’s digitiser, a very cool device which allows you to scan an object and print it off in 3D; the first ever 3D mobile phone printer; LevelUp’s mobile phone scanner; and Cheil’s beta of our very own Mubbl app (http://mubbl.com) , which lets event attendees capture the event together to create a richer, collective  digital memory. Read More »

Swiftkey has in the space of just a couple of years become one of the best selling apps on the Android platforms. It installs a keyboard on your phone that can be linked to Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, SMS, and blogs, then uses natural language technology to predict which word you are going to type next .

Up until now whole words could be added with a single tap, which improves the speed of typing, but  today the company has launched Swiftkey 4, known as Swiftkey Flow, which introduces gesture typing.

Read More »

While it isn’t brand spanking new there have been a few people of late talking about Voxer and it looks like it is starting to gain momentum. The walkie talkie style app, where you press to talk, could represent a serious challenge to text messaging on iOS and Android phones. You could also see it as a kind of voice version of BlackBerry’s BBM. You can see in this test video below that people are pretty excited about the potential that it promises.

Read More »

Tablets are not killing newspapers, they’re offering a lifeline to the revitalisation and rebirth of ‘news brands’ beyond the dreaded paywall, say the experts. Assembled at Newsworks’ Tablet Summit, representatives from the likes of Guardian Media Group, Mail Newspapers, The Independent, Expedia and News International gave their take on the future of the newspaper industry as tablet take-up rockets. Guy Zitter group managing director at the Mail put it starkly. He said it was a case of ”Adapt or die”.

Read More »

I foresee two key opportunities for the industry creative this year. One is that ambient will become a key battleground for brands trying to disrupt audiences’ daily routines. The other is the move towards the big, the bold and the simple. Both these trends may well converge of course and I look forward to exploring their possibilities.

While Minority Report’s retina-scanning six sheets may not arrive in 2013, I think the drive towards mobile-first advertising and the arrival of 4G will have brands clamoring to become even more visible in our everyday lives. Using insight to identify where ambient opportunities exist will be imperative … so we may see sports drinks advertised on treadmill screens (available in a vending machine near your locker) or footwear retailers offering discounts on sturdy boots with graffiti on snow-covered pavements. Read More »

Following the end of Instagram integration, the micro-blogging network have now launched their own photo-filter product to challenge Instagram’s domination of mobile photography.

Read More »

Facebook-owned Instagram has taken the step of blocking Twitter from displaying photos correctly by disabling its Twitter card integration. It means Instagram photos no longer display properly on Twitter and look oddly cropped. Instagram has said it made the move because it wants people to views pictures on a new Instagram web presence it is building rather than viewing them on Twitter.

The issue is, of course, many people want to view, and more importantly share, their pictures on Twitter.

While the move will have its benefits –bringing users a decent Instagram web presence is obviously a welcome move — it seems a shame that another part of the social web has to be disrupted in the on going battle for social networking supremacy.

Read More »