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 »

Hello and welcome to this week’s Espresso of Innovation; the hottest news and strongest stories from the world of creativity and technology filtered into a quick shot of inspiration. This week we’re taking a little turn on the catwalk.

Following on from the launch of the intimacy dress 2.0 that we covered in our Valentine Espresso I wanted to find out a bit more about technology and fashion. Read More »

As Chinese New Year celebrations draw to a close, it is a great opportunity to reflect on what the Year of the Snake could mean for UK businesses looking to take advantage of the huge market potential in China.

Chinese wisdom states that the Snake brings good luck, and that the year ahead will be a period marked by ‘steady progress and attention to detail, where focus and discipline will be necessary for you to achieve what you set out to create’. Read More »

(C) Netflix

This week House of Cards was made exclusively available on Netflix, the online subscription based video streaming service.  This bold move from a television aggregator that delivers content through a relatively low cost subscription model, to being a content producer (and one with deep pockets – House of Cards alone cost over $100 million to make), does have the potential to compete with both producers and distributors of broadcast content.

Netflix says it will be producing a minimum of five original series each year to entice audiences to subscribe to its service.  Potentially a game changer, Ted Sarandos, Netflix ‘s chief content officer, told GQ ‘The goal is for us to become HBO faster than HBO can become us’.

But does the research data support this move?

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Rebecca J Rosen, a senior associate editor at The Atlantic, has put forward a simple suggestion to help phase out all-male panels at tech conferences: get men to make a pledge saying “I will not speak on or moderate all-male panels at technology and science conferences”. Read More »

Sunday nights Sports Personality of the Year awards were one of several television events this year which Twitter users probably couldn’t avoid; with over 322,000 tweets mentioning the awards ceremony (either by name or the #SPOTY hashtag) on the day of the awards, 280,000 during the broadcast itself, peaking at just over 6,500 tweets per minute as Bradley Wiggins was announced as this years winner.

And, as with voting events ranging from the US elections to the X-Factor final (and our own look at the Mercury Music Prize), people are looking at how data from social media can be used to create audience insights. A reasonable hypothesis might be that the members of the public who were interested enough to cast a vote would be well represented by the Twitter users interested enough to tweet about their favourite candidates. Read More »

Social media is inextricably linked to corporate social responsibility and is creating a bigger transformation for businesses than the arrival of television, according Havas’ global chief executive David Jones.

In a candid interview on the back of the Starbucks tax furore, one of the world’s most influential ad men, and author of Who Cares Wins, was keen to stress how the likes of Twitter, Facebook and YouTube were fundamentally changing the rules of engagement for businesses today. 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.

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With only a month to go ’til Christmas our thoughts have started to turn to the inevitable and much dreaded annual questions; ‘What am I going to get people for a Christmas present?’ For the technophiles amongst us one of the big things we will probably consider is a 4G enabled phone now that EE has rolled out its 4G network. Read More »

A look here at how Apple is winning not only on the high street, in the creative world, but also in the classroom. A new market that barely existed a decade ago. Now it is a huge market as tablet computers and smartphones change the perception of education.

Teachers and lecturers are finding innovative ways to supplement their classes with the latest technology and students are beginning to see these devices as essential parts of their education experience. Read More »