Email is dead?
Radical? Not really, but communication is changing and that does mean the use of email as the defacto communication medium is coming to an end. Ask anyone under the age of 21 how they communicate and they’ll mention Text, Facebook and MSN but hardly ever mention email. To the Generation Y population email is just [...]
River Island loses its flash
It’s great to see the retailer River Island eventually give up the Flash ghost – their new site is hardly ground-breaking and just looks very “me-too” but critically they’ve decided it’s time to bow to usability pressure and get rid of the flash monstrosity they’ve been using for the last few years. Another nail in [...]
Privacy arms race is hotting up
You cannot help to notice that privacy is fast becoming one of the hottest subjects in town. Driven, in part, by the social networking revolution every Tom, Dick and Harry are throwing great new applications at us such as Facebook, Gowalla, Google Me (?) with the aim of capturing a large slice of our social [...]
Social media at a personal level
Shamelessly lifted and edited from blog.hubspot.com is an excellent article illustrating the meteoric rise to fame that Justin Bieber has seen in the last year. Well worth reading the full version but if you can’t be arsed then I’ve summarized it here. Justin Bieber is the most searched for celebrity on the internet and has [...]
Google Wave sinks, fast
Image by Shekhar_Sahu via Flickr Recently Google announced that it’s next generation email/IM/collab tool would be scrapped (http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/04/wave-goodbye-to-google-wave/) just a year after a huge wave (see what I did there?) of PR and spin from the inventor of Google itself, Sergey Brin. Just over a year later it has sunk. Usefully, Google are keeping the [...]
The cost of delaying – getting a testing regime implemented
Most organisations, especially marketing-driven ones, are not familiar with one of the greatest web weapons available, namely continual testing. Traditional departments hum their day away thinking of great new “marketing” initiatives and wish they had invented the Meerkat or the two annoying blokes on the Safestyle Windows advert. Most of what they produce is low-grade, [...]
The fold is dead!
“Above the fold” shouts one of the new breed of “conversion experts”. I’m sure you’ve heard the echoes across the online marketing departments and “paradigm shifting” agencies that litter the cave of new media. Cover your ears and run, screaming, out into the light. Thankfully, this is not the case. Much like the focus on [...]
Tactile web?
The absence of many of the senses (touch, smell, taste and largely, hear) when interacting with t’interweb is a challenge that at some point needs addressing if we are to replicate the real world into the virtual world. Lots of studies have shown that these senses greatly influence our decisions and if virtual environments seek [...]
Farming in a virtual future
Image via Wikipedia China is seeing the rise of online “Gold Farming” This is the practice of hiring a group of mainly poor kids to ply their way through the myriad of online games (Everquake, World of Warcraft et al) collecting things of value to other gamers such as gold, potions, weapons etc. These items [...]
Kiva, changing the world, price £16
Please do take a look at www.kiva.org, it’s a really clever idea that allows people to loan small amounts of money to budding entrepreneurs, no more than £16 ($25) in the third world. These small amounts, aggregated, provide (typically) no more than a few thousand dollars to micro-business people to start small ventures designed to [...]
