Ever wondered where Foursquare was launched, where Twitter hit the big time or where you can hear keynotes from the likes of Jimmy Wales, Guy Kawasaki, Craig Newmark, Evan Williams or even Mr Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, himself – well Austin, Texas is where it is at in March as SXSW comes to town.

And next week we will throwing ourselves into the madness of SXSW Interactive as part of the UKTI Trade Mission along with 39 other companies from the UK and over 25,000 others from round the Globe. We will endeavour to bring you daily updates as to themes, new ideas and creative technologies on show along with the weird and wonderful from Austin. Read More »

Yes, we are all on Facebook. We all on Facebook so much so that I regularly communicate with my mother, sisters, cousins and even grandfather that way. For a lot of my friends and far-flung family, having an email address is almost silly now, as we interact regularly through status updates and photo comments. (For everything else, we have BBM, but that is another story).

With what seems like a zillion connections and not very much time, I’ve optimised my news feed to weed out those pesky Facebook game requests. It was Mafia Wars and Farmville requests, but now it seems to be all Cityville and updates on everyone’s Words with Friends scores. It sometimes feels like I am the only one not playing, but some of our recent research has shown that just over a quarter of those who use Facebook from a computer in the UK are playing Facebook games. While it isn’t everyone, it’s still a huge number of people.
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So this morning I went to create an account Pinterest, the new and very pretty virtual pinboard site that, like, EVERYONE is talking about. And oh no! They’re doing that thing where you can only sign up using your Facebook or Twitter login details. Like This Is My Jam. and Quora. And countless other new applications.

I mentioned on Twitter how much I dislike being forced to do this and had a flood of replies from people saying the same thing – along with the odd one saying well actually it’s quite a reasonable thing to do. So I thought I’d open it up to the group… Read More »

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 »