According to a new report from Walker Sands, the amount of website traffic coming from mobile devices jumped from 17.5% in Q3 2012 to 23.1% in Q4 2012this represents an 84% hike from 12. Q4 2011. The research is based on web analytics data across a range of Walker Sands’ B2B and B2C clients across multiple industries.
Facebook is testing a new “want” button. This testing is being in the USA with a limited group of retailers. Basically what they are doing in allowing the retailers’ customers to create “wish lists” (which are essentially a shopping list).
This Facebook Collections feature (it’s real name) is designed to help retailers market and promote their goods. What happens is that, in addition to clicking the 'like' button, visitors and browsers can also 'collect' and 'want' products from the retailer. These products that are “wanted” then appear on their timeline (as well as in their friend's timeline).
While it is generally agreed that the sales of iPhone’s has faltered over the past couple of months due to “rumour and speculation”, Apple will likely sell shed-loads of iPhones once they launch of the iPhone 5 (which is expected to launch on September 12th. Wall Street currently expects Apple to report sales of between 22 million and 23 million iPhones during the September quarter. But if Apple ships its next generation iPhone on September 21, as expected, sales could be even higher.
According to a recent report by Deloitte, a quarter of people are “second screening” while watching TV while this figure doubles for 16-24 year olds. This is the term used to describe people using another another device, such as email, Facebook and Twitter to discuss what they are watching on TV.
There are currently about 6.9 billion smartphones enabled across the globe. Each and every day, more and more get activated and more websites are producing smartphone-optimized content.
I worked for Microsoft way back in the 1990’s. Once a year, all of the Microsoft faithful got together for a big love-in. Like high-priests that they were back then, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer would preach. Like faithful parishioners, we lapped it up. At the end of this annual bash, we were all wound up like a highly strung Swiss watches. And off we went, for another year, gunning for the Top 3 “targets” that Bill and Steve had chosen for the coming months.
Of all the app stores out there, Apple has the greatest number available in its store with over half a million available to download so it’s no surprise that more and more developers are focusing on it. Flurry Analytics has released its latest report which shows that iOS app account for 69% of all projects [...]
Apple and Android may have the most populated and popular app stores at the moment, but Facebook still plans to leverage its 500 million mobile users and create an app ecosystem that will give its competitors a run for its money. Mobile may be regarded as the site's major weakness, but with the launch of its own App Center and an individual app strategy appearing to take shape...
While not as illustrious as Apple or Google's stores, Amazon's Appstore mightn't have the same number of apps to match its competitors, having 31,000 apps back in March 2012, but it has one feature that is bound to help them increase the number of purchases in its store...
Are you a parking douche? That is the question that a brilliant new campaign in Russia is asking where they are trying to solve the problem of illegal parking. Using a mobile app, social media and some innovative thinking, the campaign tackles the problem in a unique way...
For anybody who manages a Facebook page, the big challenge has always been doing so from a mobile device. However, today Facebook have launched an update to their apps that allow page admins to start managing their pages in a far more effective way...
I was a little shocked today when I glanced down at my phone and saw that the three apps that I used the most all belonged to Facebook. For a company that's said to be struggling with mobile and has an IPO coming up, that is not a bad position to be in...
With there being so many disaster and alert apps released on iOS and Android over the last few months, you'd be (almost) forgiven for thinking that this is a real product. Instead the app on display is a parody app from Friends of the Earth Netherlands, who is protesting against Royal Dutch Shell for the pollution it's causing in the Niger Delta in Africa...
Experiencing a massive surge in popularity, a new report from mobile app analytics company Flurry Analytics found that photo & video is the fastest growing app category for mobile users, ahead of music, productivity, social networking and entertainment...
Facebook's mobile advertising strategy may have yet to start up properly but the company can feel confident that their mobile sites is experiencing a rapid increase in the amount of traffic directed to mobile apps after sending more than 160 million visitors to mobile apps last month...
One of the huge draws of Pinterest is not the large range of products that are now on display, but the way in which such products are discovered and shared across the site. Social discovery is at the center of Pinterest and it's something that other sites are waking up to and implementing into their own services...
The world's biggest professional social network, Linkedin, has finally arrived on the iPad with the launch of their new app that brings their professional network to the world's best selling tablet. As you would expect, the app is beautiful and packed full of nice features to help the business networker...
Nike are well known for their innovative marketing all over the world to help sell shoes, and their latest campaign in Japan uses face recognition technology and your web cam to transform yourself into a shoe. It's all done with the aim of showing just how flexible their new shoes are and you'll be able to waste a good ten minutes having fun with this....
With the worth of a smartphone being determined by what apps you can download for it, advertisers have recognised that this is an area of growth and the most likely place for revenue to be generated, and will be placing a greater focus on it, according to a new report...
Do you love the design and layout of Pinterest, but wished that the same functionality could be transferred over to other social media sites? If so, there's a new app available for Facebook that takes its cue from the ever popular site by doing away with Timeline and reformatting it in the style of a Pinterest board...
If you use Gmail and ever wondered what your email habits are like, how fast you respond to emails and how you organise your inbox, you're in luck as a new apps has been created to visualise your email habits...
Microsoft Phone and Bing, neither of which has enjoyed a great deal of success after being muscled out by Apple and Google, has released a new app that starts using AR in a way that is both practical and useful. They have released a new version of Bing's Translator app, which not only has the usual features you would associate with such an app, but gives you the ability to translate text by simply highlighting it with your camera...
Spotify is a brilliant service that is used in offices all over the world to share playlists but one big problem can be when a bad song comes on that people don't agree with and the skip button is too far away. Well a cool new tool invented by an agency allows you to throw pieces of paper at a poster to skip that tune...
For many small businesses, one of the biggest challenges at the moment is establishing a presence on mobile where customers can easily find them. The other problem is that Facebook pages are not always easy to find on mobile devices. Luckily, a new service which has just launched turns your Facebook page into a simple mobile app...
It was only revealed last week that Amazon was piloting in-app purchasing for the last month with the plan to give it a widespread release soon. Turns out that day came a lot sooner than expected as Amazon announced that it's releasing the API for both Kindle Fire and Android devices today...
Ever since they made the switch over to Timeline, Facebook has been releasing more and more reports showing just how successful its Open Graph is for apps. The latest report concerns the different video companies that have made their way onto Timeline...
Less than two weeks ago, Instagram tweeted a link to a page where Android users could sign up for the service and be notified the moment it's made available. Well that wait wasn't as long as people had anticipated as the popular photo sharing app has made available to download for Android devices...
After Facebook removed their discussions pages late last year, a new solution presented itself in the form of Forum for Pages, an app which allows pages to host their own discussion forums. It was a handy way for brand pages who have a large community...
Here's an interesting discovery from mobile analytics firm Flurry, it turns out that when you compare the revenue earned by Apple's iTunes app store to other competitors, it's Amazon's App Store and not Google's that's comes closest to matching it...
At its most basic level, Facebook is a place where you connect with your friends, a central hub which allows you to keep up to date with what your friends are up to. But now one developer has decided to take this a step further, and create an app that lets you list your enemies...
With the lack of must-have apps available on the Windows Phone combined with the need to increase this number to appeal to consumers, Microsoft and Nokia have announced a deal which will see them invest up to €18 million in a new mobile application development program called 'AppCampus'...
After it was revealed that ads in free apps are the major reason for draining your smartphone battery, a new report is giving users another reason to resort to paid apps instead of free apps with advertising...
Considering how much importance Facebook are placing on the mobile experience, in both a practical and commercial sense, how developers and brands utilize their pages and apps is vital for its success. Their mobile strategy mainly features unobtrusive advertising that's expected to be introduced soon, but the company are now allowing (for now) developers to view just how well their apps are doing across mobile platforms...
If one of the major problems with your smartphone is battery related, chances are it's not the phone itself but the apps you're using, or more specifically, the ads that appear on numerous free apps...
Are you feeling left out? Do you feel that the mobile revolution is passing you by? Is an injection of app-store-cool just what you need to fix your sluggish online presence?
Well think again before spending a cent on a mobile app.
Isn’t it funny how the internet changes everything in marketing but actually changes nothing? We still all chase after the latest bright and shiny thing in digital without any real thought or planning. We believe this new, shiny thing is going to change everything.
Here are 3 steps to creating the best mobile app for your business....
1. DO NOT SIMPLY REPLICATE THE CONTENT OF YOUR WEBSITE.
I've downloaded several apps by Irish companies over the past few weeks and what does the app do? Well, nothing actually! It just presents the text and photos from their website in an app. And they think that they are surfing the mobile wave. I am afraid all they are achieving is annoying their customers. Why bother going to the trouble of having a truly wonderful website and then deliver the same content through a mobile device. Why not do something creative? For example, have a look at what Tripit do on their web site versus the itinerary manager app.
2. USE THE FUNCTIONALITY OF THE SMARTPHONE
The best apps are the ones that leverage the existing functionality of the phone and end up creating a really useful or novel app to solve a real situation. Car Rental companies are introducing apps allow you to report an accident. For
If you regularly upload photos onto Facebook, chances are you've a number of photos that you feel are impressive enough to be displayed on your wall. If that's the case, a U.S. company called CanvasPop, a company that prints out uploaded and Instagram photos, have expanded their service so that you can blow up and print out your own Facebook photos...
A few months ago, eBay added a new feature to its iPad app called 'Watch With eBay', allowing users to purchase and check out items that they were currently seeing on their TV screens. It was a fantastic idea and really tapped into the duel screen culture (watching TV while using a phone, tablet or computer device) that more and more people are adhering to. It was a fun and quirky way of adding to the experience...
Having been exclusively an iPhone app for two years, Instagram has been one of the major success stories for app developers, having become one of the most popular apps on iOS. It was revealed earlier this month that the company had 25 million...
PayPal are making considerable strides in integrating its services into different businesses. Their most recent example was its 'bricks and mortar' payment option which it rolled out in more than 2,000 Home Depot stores in the U.S. However, it's not just limiting itself to just retail, it's bringing its service to restaurants and bars through its new partnership with Tabbedout, a start-up which allows people to pay their tabs through an app...
Popular social magazine app Flipboard has just updated its apps to include a number of features that make reading more intuitive and handier for users. Announcing it on their blog, the first is that cover photos, a popular feature on the iPhone version, has been brought over to iPad...
Considering the fact that there's roughly 425 million mobile users out of a total of 825 million Facebook users, it's no surprise that Facebook is making a push towards developing their mobile experience. Acting as a potential goldmine for revenue if they crack it, the company is putting measures...
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has criticised the privacy policies of mobile apps aimed at children as well as Apple's and Google's app stores, saying that a broad range of information about young users is being collected and parents aren't be...
We're seeing more and more brands recognising the potential of doing business through Facebook, incorporating social elements and having friends browse and recommend items is a powerful tool for marketers to have when they're enticing new customers. Cr...
How are you sharing a little love this Valentines Day and how does the Internet help you do that? Google again has a great video to celebrate Valentines Day when you go to their search engine. Here are some interesting facts about how we search on Vale...
Heineken have created a new Facebook app in time for Valentine's day. Called 'The Serenade', users can create a personalised video designed to ask a potential love interest out on a date. The app is available in twenty different languages and is set to...
With the capabilities of Facebook’s open graph only beginning to be explored, career site Glassdoor have announced their new job search app ‘Inside Connections’, which helps you find a new job and see where your friends work via your ...
After creating a successful campaign "hire us or we'll marry", one of the two girls involved has created a new concept app for Facebook and Spotify. The app allows you to include songs with your status update, using keywords typed in to select songs th...
Last week, Facebook unveiled 60 apps that would be seamlessly integrated into users profiles, and some of these apps are a great way to truly personalise your Timeline. So with Facebook making Timelines compulsory for every user from tomorrow onwards, ...
With over 40 billion applications already downloaded from both the Apple App store and Android Market, the smartphone market is becoming more important with every passing day so it's perhaps apt that a recent report by mobile analytics firm Flurry has ...
With the number of new Facebook apps that you can add onto your timeline, with them comes the broadcasting of your online habits such as listening to music or reading of articles. While this isn't always a bad think, it can be annoying if such updates ...
Shortly after Instagram launched their new feature which allowed users to upload full size images onto Facebook, photo app Aviary has launched its new app for Facebook which allows you to add effects and features to your already existing Facebook photo...
With social media campaigns, the usual methods of getting a message across would be through Facebook and Twitter, and if it was for a mobile audience, a specialised app would be created. But Amnesty International, who have to their credit launched some...
When travelling around the world, it normally takes a bit of time to adjust yourself to your surrounding, but it takes longer to really explore a city or location once you get past the traditional tourist destinations. The best way of getting a feel fo...
It's only been two months since LinkedIn relaunched its card scanning app CardMunch, but already it's been a success as it's scanned over 2 million different cards or more accurately one million since August 2011. While some may have seen it as a somew...
Weddings are places with lots of free drink, plenty of single people and where everybody is having a good time and crashing them become popular several years ago with the film "Wedding Crashers". Things move a step forward today with the launch of a ne...
Facebook seem to have an app for every aspect of everyday life at this stage, but what about the afterlife? With Facebook accounts becoming more and more ubiquitous, they serve a purpose as a keepsake box of sorts, with the new timeline profiles furthe...
The students at the Miami Ad School are normally good at coming up with concept campaigns that use social media, technology and smartphones in a creative manner. Some of them come to fruition with the latest example, Metropoli, coming...
After adding speech features to its successful feature Translate, Google have now allowed Android users to write out what they want translated through their experimental handwriting feature. Users can now write out characters that they want translated ...
With technology advancing at a regular pace, it means that regular mediums are (supposedly) being phased out. More and more people are using smartphones, tablets and e-book readers and using books and newspapers less. There's an idea that...
While not a gamechanger by any means, the hype surrounding Siri has meant that over the last few months, numerous app developers and programmers have attempted to recreate the same features for rival...
Have you ever wondered about the journey that your baggage goes on when you check it in with your airline? It has been a bit of a mystery to many of us up until today as Delta have just released a new video featuring hidden cameras to help promote the ...
We are all sick of hearing just how much time we all waste on email and what an ineffective communication tool it is. In the last month we have even seen one company ban it completely and another switch off emails outside of work hours. For many of us ...
Kontakt is an app that transforms all your contacts into simple, visual infographs. They can take the form of bar graphs, visual diagrams, binary, braille or even in the number of leaves in a dandelion. Also when you select a particular contact, the ap...
Since it's coming up to the end of the year, more and more groups are releasing their end of year reports on every possible area imaginable. The next area to get the treatment are smartphones, or more specifically the number of apps...
Having launched In-App Payments back in July for businesses based in the U.S., Google have expanded the service so that it is available in 17 extra countries.he regions benefiting from the service are mostly European countries with three being outside ...
Belgian ad agency Boondoggle have created an alarm clock app called the Winter Wake Up App which collects weather data for wherever you are and wakes you up earlier if the weather is unexpectedly frosty or snowy. That way, you have enough time to defro...
If there's one brand that's been getting a lot of attention for their innovative socail media campaigns, it's KLM who have been responsible for the live reply tweet and the gift surprise among many others. This campaign not only taps...
Motor companies have been very creative when it comes to mobile and social media with Ford normally being ahead of the pack. The brand are due to unveil their new 2013 Ford Fusion Sedan at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit next mont...
If you have a really good memory, You may remember a while back when we wrote about Jotly, the app which wasn’t actually an app. Well now FireSpotter, who were behind the joke, have gone ahead and release it on an unsuspecting app market. The jok...
Openspace have opened the world's first physical app store, designed to educate and help consumers with the purchasing of apps and give them the best value for money. The store only opened last week in the US and it is hoped that the store will expand ...
Last week, Google announced that their Android market had reached the 10 billion download mark, a significant achievement that highlights the growing popularity of the smartphone medium. To celebrate this, a number of Android apps are available for...
There's been some innovative campaigns to promote safe sex among young people and this is a clever way of engaging with an audience.To help promote safe sex in Stockholm and increase awareness, Swedish Agency Ester decided to hand out 50,000 condoms, e...
Outdoor adventure store REI has launched their first store in New York City, a city who's inhabitants wouldn't be seen as an audience interested in seeing the great outdoors. So to convince them to visit the shop and explore the world, REI posted up mo...
A Vodka company have just launched a new Facebook app that pulls in some of your most common online activities and tells you if you are leading a full social life in the online world. Using photos, checkins and mood analysis this app will tell you how ...
When it comes to creating apps, the barriers to entry are starting to decrease rapidly. This video with a twelve year old kid giving a presentation at a TedX event shows that just about anybody can now create their own applications and businesses from ...
With the introduction of Augmented Reality (AR), we expected that it was inevitable that somebody, somewhere would use the technology for this purpose. Outdoor clothing retailer Moosejaw has released a new app for their catalogue which functions as an ...
Chilean biweekly newspaper El Ciudadano (The Citizen) have created a new way to tap into crowdsourcing apps by making each image into a shareable front cover of their newspaper. The app allows users to take a snapshot and give an accompanying headline ...
In the run up to the festive period, one of the things that Starbucks customers look forward to are the red cups that are served during this time. Because of their popularity, Starbucks will be adding an extra feature which will allow those with a smar...
Has a friend ever uploaded and tagged a photo of you on Facebook that came across as unflattering? Worried that such photos could potentially jeopardise a job application or leave a bad impression among prospective employees? Well if that's the case, E...
Writing tens of tweets every day can be a tough and time consuming experience, but a new app is looking to pick up where new Apple tool Siri left off. The app allows people to dictate their tweets and have all their friend's Twitter ramblings read out ...
Startup company Romotive have designed Romo, a robot which utilizes your smartphone capabilities and includes movement accessories as well as the physical capabilities that a robot requires to take over the world...or fetch you a soft drink...
Benjamin Franklin once said that “there are only two certainties in life: Death and taxes”, the latter, unfortunately, is something that we all deal with on a regular basis. Since managing your finances is a process everyone must go through, we're ...
A9.com, a company specialising in search technology and a subsidiary of Amazon.com, has released an new iPhone app called Flow that allows users to discover information about products just by scanning them...
Social media, mobile and apps are changing plenty of industries right in front of our eyes but probably none more so than the restaurant industry which is entering a new phase of complete and utter transparency which will only benefit consumer. Here ar...
QR codes come in all shapes and sizes but even though they have enjoyed spectacular growth in the last year we can genuinely say that we never thought we would see them taking pride of place in a grave yard. That is what is happening in Seattle as one ...
Some time ago location-based social apps and networks such as Foursquare and Gowalla, have launched the wave of “checking in” at locations such as restaurants or stores in exchange for points. These services were referred to or often described as games. While these apps are quite simple examples as far as games go (checking in at a bar with Foursquare , Facebook, Gowalla is done in a matter of seconds) the real world games using location based services are becoming more and more sophisticated and they grow to be hot online and mobile marketing tools.
So where did location-based games originate from? There are a few of us who didn’t play ‘Hide and seek’, 'Treasure Hunt' or ‘Capture the flag’ as children. These old, traditional location-based games should be familiar to almost all of us. When the era of video games came along, gradually the only location you played in was the living room and then your pc. It became dull but with the new technologies this shift is now coming full circle - according to Moxie's trendspotter, Greg Steen - as modern mobile games are using geo-location, image recognition and augmented reality technologies to combine the real and virtual world.
According to Jon Jordan, the phenomenon of rapid growth of modern location-enabled games can be linked to the fact that they combine the three hottest trends in the mobile industry: a mobile, location-based apps and social media. The game then evolves via a player's location. Consequently, location-based games almost always support some kind of localization technology, for example
Linkedin have today launched a feature that could have massive consequences for the entire recruitment industry as their new "apply now" button allows companies to embed a button that will accept job applications with one simple click of a button. It m...
One of the most obvious benefits that social media brought is the speed of which information is shared. From the large scale disasters such as the Japan earthquake to minor accidents or delays experienced on your route home. However, the problem with t...
For a couple of years Facebook's march to world domination seemed more like a walk in the part but in the last month the tide seems to have turned somewhat and the world's biggest social network faces some major hurdles. We look at their biggest challe...
Facebook have made a recent change to their platform, that affects the way apps are listed in Facebook Search. The solution is easy for developers to follow and allows your app to be easily discoverable within Facebook search.
David Ogilvy would have been 100 if he was still around this week and to mark the occasion the Ogilvy agency have created an app for the iPhone that allows you to pitch to the man himself over video call in a scene that could have come straight out of ...
Google seem to be launching something new pretty much every single day of the week these days in the social space and the latest is an app called photovine which although not live in the app store has it's own landing page. Google says that vines are g...
The Facebook app Branchout has recently celebrated its one year birthday and are showing some impressive growth, suggesting that they are set for a real race against LinkedIn to become the business social network of choice. While the two are not direct...
A new tool has launched that transforms the Twitter experience completely, filtering out the most frequent tweeters so that those who tweet less frequently have an equal chance of being heard. It's still in prototype mode, but the experience offered is...
A new application has been kicking up a storm recently with almost half a million Facebook users getting their own virtual "report card" based on their Facebook usage. The application analyzes your likes, photos, videos and status updates to give you a...