If Sherlock Holmes were around today, he’d often be found chillaxing around the cafes of Baker Street, necking cups of espresso by the bucketload, muttering under his breath about the price of Madame Tussauds tickets, tinkering with his iPad – and, despite himself, instinctively sensing which brands felt ‘right’.

Being Sherlock Holmes, and therefore the authority on everything, he’d know that tone of voice and personality used to be qualities mainly associated with copy and art direction, but now they could be attributed to the way a brand ‘feels’ using digital touchpoints too.

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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 »

News Corp’s exclusive iPad newspaper was unveiled at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City today by Rupert Murdoch, joined by Apple’s Eddy Cue, who was standing in for Steve Jobs.

Featuring a 100+ page newspaper covering current affairs, gossip, opinion, arts and life, apps and games, and sports with lots of complementary multimedia content such as videos and 360 degree images, The Daily is available just in the US at present, at a cost of 99c a week through the iPad App Store.

The application will update throughout the day and you’ll be able to comment on articles, share them on social sites and even have some of them read to you. Read More »

Apple fanboys, look away now.

Artist Michael Tompert, a former graphic designer at Apple, is putting on an exhibition showing Apple products which he has destroyed in various ways – burned with blowtorches, smashed with sledgehammers, chopped up with handsaws or shot with a handgun.

The results are then photographed in the typically fetishistic style of Tompert’s former employer, all close-up and against a plain white background.

Presumably the image editing was done elsewhere, what with all his own gear being smashed up all over the studio and all. Read More »

Johann Hari, the redoubtable Independent journalist and campaigner, has turned up on US current affairs programme highlighting once again the issue of extremely poor working conditions among Chinese factory workers – particularly those working to make Apple’s iPads and iPhones.

Here’s a clip: well worth a watch (and not because the host, Dylan Ratigan, mysteriously refers to his iPhone as “this bugger” in the first 30 seconds or so). Read More »

One application created such a storm when it hit Apple’s iPad last week that you could easily have missed the news that the BBC have finally released apps for the iPhone and iPad. So what app managed to create such a storm that even those without iPads were talking about it? Read More »

Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer has announced that consumers can expect to see a raft of Microsoft tablets and smart devices launched into the Apple-dominated tablet market, a range of products that even the hyperactive CEO described as just “quite impressive”. Read More »

The ebook price war has begun in the US. Amazon  has cut the price if its Kindle from $259 to $189 (£128) and Barnes & Noble’s wi-fi-only version of the Nook will sell for just $149 (just £100). Read More »

Lots of publishers have reimagined their magazines as an iPad app, but no one yet has created an iPad-only magazine. Until now. The first issue of a title called Sideways is available from the US app store for $3.99, and appropriately for a magazine that targets earlier adopters its content is focused on that readership’s current obsession – their iPad. Read More »