From Friday, The Guardian will begin charging its 280,000 active iPad users £9.99 a month to use its iPad app. It is going to be a big moment for the Guardian, a test of paid content, while it continues to maintain a rich free website.

Since its launch in October The Guardian iPad has been free, by way of a sponsorship deal with Channel 4, but now those three months of free access are up the question is how many of those readers will pay? Read More »

Facebook has always been about driving engagement, the problem they’ve had over the past few years is that their mechanism for engagement hasn’t gone much further than the inflexible ‘Like’ button, a share, or, if you’re lucky, a comment or two. This was great while it lasted, but it did open brands pages up for social media black hat techniques.

We’ve seen a well-known socially irrelevant brand up their likes by 5,000 in the space of a week and take unprecedented engagement from people, that if you investigate, either work for their PR agency, or are praising the price of a product they’re ineligible to purchase.
All very naughty and not in the spirit of organic brand growth. Read More »

We created The Phantom Clickerist because we wanted to experiment with creating children’s content specifically for the iPad with totally original characters and storyline with unique interactions fully integrated into each page. The result is, we hope, a beautifully illustrated, amazingly interactive experience for parents and children.

The market it still very young and people are still trying different ideas. How could we produce a product that makes the most of the iPad? Read More »

If you were to invent a way of sharing recipes and cooking techniques from scratch today, it’s unlikely that what you’d come up with is a traditional cookery book.

Instead you’d probably look at creating an app, possibly incorporating video as well as text, and you’d probably want it to have some way where you could flick through the stages of a recipe without requiring you to get your floury, buttery fingers all over your shiny touchscreen. Read More »

Two of world’s biggest corporations have launched a joint web-venture that will allow users to search store-specific promotions across Walmart’s 3,500+ US retail locations through a customizable Facebook app.

Walmart’s 9.4m Facebook fans will be able to search the store nearest them and find deals on everything from LED TVs to Halloween candy. Promotions will be at store-level, so local events will dictate “rollback alerts” sent to app users, from football matches to inclement weather. Read More »

Today Marketing reported that Microsoft UK has appointed Philippa Snare, long-term employee at the company, as its chief marketing officer, which seems to be the final piece in a jigsaw puzzle of a restructure and follows months of turmoil.

Over the past few months Microsoft UK has been rocked by the global restructure lead out of Redwood. Having merged and reorganised departments to separate marketing, advertising and products, Microsoft claims it will be able to grow its market share and continue to innovate. Read More »

Low-cost airline bmibaby is to reward users of the photo-sharing social network Instagram with a free flight to a European city.

Bmibaby teamed up with Instagram back in July to launch its own Instagram feed, and asked its customers to share photos of their trips. Read More »

With new Forrester research telling us that tablet penetration in the UK is set to rise from less than 5% this year to over 30% in 2015, brands have to sit up and take notice of the tablet and its fertile potential as a marketing tool. But by being at the front end of content production, brands are woefully unaware of the technicalities that need to be taken into account.

And seeing as though these considerations provide the foundations of a tablet-targeted production, they can affect the very nature of the content. So here’s a list of ten techie flags that brands – and their agencies – would do well to be mindful of. Read More »

Perhaps not too scarred from his last listening excursive, health secretary Andrew Lansley launched a crowd-sourcing initiative this week, calling on the general public and healthcare professionals to submit ideas for a series of health apps which could help improve NHS healthcare.

While Lansley has been lambasted for being seriously out of touch over his botched NHS reform plans of late, the move does touch on a wider trend in using digital technology to aid healthcare. Read More »

The updated Linked in iPhone app

For obvious reasons Google has long-trumpeted the notion that brands should create a mobile optimised site first before developing a costly iPhone app.

While Google now offers a free way of doing so with its recently launched Mobilize tool, brands are looking to create more sophisticated mobile sites as they start to realise that the only way isn’t necessarily Apple. Read More »