Digital News & Articles

Mountain View, California-based startup Swipp is doing its best to turn its name into a verb. In January, it released the first consumer application of its social intelligence platform, allowing users to swipp (rate/comment and view ratings/comments) specific topics. This week, it is launching a new social intelligence suite for businesses, Swipp Plus.  

Online advertising seems tailor-made for direct response marketing, given its measurability and ability to land an immediate sale. But now online channels are growing up in their capability to deliver media content and audiences, and the majority of online marketers in 2013 are fairly evenly splitting their digital spending between brand and direct response advertising -- even though there’s still a lack of consistency in effectively measuring ROI across platforms. That picture of the evolution of online advertising emerges from a new survey report by Vizu, a Nielsen company. 

The fact that GOV.UK has won a top design award shows that the benefits of functional web design are finally being recognized. 

This week gave us a look at what needs to go on internally and externally to make customer communities work, we talked gamification, SharePoint and took a look at risk management through discovery readiness. 

Let's take a quick look at a few releases out this week aimed at increasing social and business insights, enabling video collaboration and putting your SharePoint show on the road.

For this week’s Facebook feature, we're looking at a new release from the social network: Partners Categories, an advertisement tool.

Sure, Android is king of the worldwide hill as the most used mobile platform. But iOS is laughing all the way to the bank. A new report from Opera Mediaworks indicates that the iPhone has retaken the lead for traffic volume, while iOS continues to be on top overall for traffic and for making money. 

As myths go, the budget iPhone is up there with unicorns and mermaids. It is the phone that could destroy or save Apple, depending on who you believe and, like the Loch Ness Monster, is pretty camera shy, until now.

What’s the value for major brands of a Facebook Fan? According to a new study, the average is $174, an increase of 28 percent from 2010. 

Twitter is now offering marketers the ability to target people based on keywords in their timelines. 

As manufacturers design and build, and we buy millions of smart phones, tablets and other whiz bang wireless devices, another group, an arcane bunch of engineers and scientists in the bowels of the communications network world are talking, mostly among themselves, about channel capacity limits, Shannon limits and a bunch of other stuff liberally punctuated with enough equations to make your head swim.

B2B commerce is trending towards the B2C model, an Oracle report has found, and companies are looking to expand their online sales because customers' expectations have changed in the face of those consumer buying practices.

Yahoo is slowly turning its ship around and still has millions of email users, and might attract more with its new magazine-like approach to mail with a new iPad and Android app. 

There are many kinds of customer communities, from fans on Facebook, to private communities that congregate on company forums. But what makes people join up? What keeps them coming back? How can you start getting your customer community engaged?

 Twitter's music app is now live for mere mortals, after its celeb-only launch last week. Prepare to find new music or your favorites, via the power of social media and popular apps.