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Apple Dominates Mobile Traffic

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.

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Does Facebook need a 'want' button?

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).

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What Can We Expect from iPhon​e 5?

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.

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Quarter of TV Watchers are Second Screening

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.

 

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Apple Still Rocking’ After All These Years!

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.

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Facebook Pushes Mobile Development With Easy App Center Installs

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...

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Glimpse Shopping App Takes On Pinterest By Using Facebook Likes

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...

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Linkedin Launch Beautiful New iPad App

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...

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Smart Nike Web App Turns Your Face Into A Shoe

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....

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Pinview Presents Your Facebook Content As A Pinterest Board

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...

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Microsoft Embraces Augmented Reality For Bing-Powered Translator App

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...

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Amazon Now Allowing Developers To Create Freemium Apps

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...

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Instagram Finally Rolled Out To Android Smartphones

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...

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Facebook Add Mobile Insights To Apps; Future Feature For Brand Pages?

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...

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To App Or Not to App – That Is The Question

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

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CanvasPop Lets You Print Out Your Facebook Photos & Hang Them As Art

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...

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eBay Make iPad Update A Standalone App; Purchase Items You See On TV

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...

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Put It On My Tab: PayPal Enters Bars & Restaurants Market With Tabbedout

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...

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Gamers Take to the Streets With Location Based Real World Gaming

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

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