Digital Marketing Forum

A marketing company in America has been rapped by the Federal Trade Commission for publishing reviews of its clients' games on iTunes. The organisation, Reverb Marketing, has issued a statement suggesting it regarded the matter as trivial and didn't want to spend ages fighting this sort of lawsuit. We haven't …

Justin Bieber is, so my 10 year old daughter informs me, a pop sensation. Actually, her exact words when I asked just who the heck this Bieber bloke who keeps topping the Twitter trending chart is were: Oh My God, Justin Bieber, he's gorgeous. A little more journalistic investigation turned …

A two-day marathon of almost real-time, personalized ads based on social media requests was so successful that it was causing Internet outages, according to an [URL="http://www.adweek.com/aw/content_display/news/agency/e3i190b1d465625a16da56dd5e7075cb1a3?pn=1"]article [/URL]on the campaign in [I]AdWeek[/I]. The 'Old Spice Guy,' actor Isaiah Mustafa, made more than 200 little videos over the course of two days …

Not only is there a [URL="http://www.daniweb.com/news/story304425.html"]debate [/URL]about the constitutionality of using Global Positioning System units to help fight crime – now there’s concern about using Google Earth as well. The Associated Press [URL="http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100814/ap_on_hi_te/us_eyes_in_the_sky"]reported [/URL]a few days ago that government officials in regions ranging from the Riverhead, N.Y., to the country …

[ATTACH=LEFT]16647[/ATTACH]On Friday, the world’s largest online marketplace announced the launch of its U.S. exclusive eBay Bucks Rewards Program. The cashback incentive gives the consumer a 2% return on most items available for sale on the site. "We're giving eBay's most loyal shoppers something special in return -- money to spend …

[ATTACH=RIGHT]16444[/ATTACH]Japanese mobile social gaming company DeNA, traded publicly on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, is reported massive first quarter profits yesterday (August 5th), with heavy implications that there may soon be a new social sheriff in town. Revenue for their first fiscal quarter reached $279 million, up 175% year-over-year. In comparison …

[URL="http://www.facebook.com"]Facebook[/URL] has got in the way of [URL="http://www.google.com"]Google[/URL] and acquired [URL="http://www.friendfeed.com"]Friendfeed[/URL]. This is not great news for Google. The search giant has one major chink in its armour; you can't search social media in real time. Once entries have been around for a while you can find stuff; I've certainly …

[ATTACH=right]16573[/ATTACH]Just as it seemed one Google Street View debacle in a foreign country came to a resolution today, another was just beginning thousands of miles away. The problems first began for Google in Germany in May, when the company's Street View vehicles collected private data that was sent across unencrypted …

[ATTACH=RIGHT]16532[/ATTACH]Yet [URL="http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/09/google-aquires-jambool-social-gold/"]another target of Google's shopping list has been revealed[/URL], this time [URL="http://www.jambool.com/"]Jambool[/URL], the producer of Social Gold, a payment product that allows developers to build a payment system directly into their applications. The purchase price is a rumored $55 million dollars, with an additional sum on earnout. Founded in …

[ATTACH=RIGHT]16533[/ATTACH]George Washington once said he never told a lie. Abraham Lincoln eloquently addressed, "With malice toward none, with charity toward all." John F. Kennedy once exhorted, "Ask not what your country can do for you--ask what you can do for your country." Basil Marceaux once stoically exclaimed, “Vote for me …

[ATTACH=right]16482[/ATTACH][URL="http://demandmedia.com"]Demand Media[/URL], a name that isn't well-known but tends to stir existential emotions in those who do know the Santa Monica-based content farm and domain services company, confirmed some longstanding gossip and rumor on Friday when it filed for its initial public offering (IPO). Demand operates something called [URL="http://demandstudios.com"]Demand Studios[/URL], …

Is this the beginning of a backlash? It looks as though there's some research out there to suggest that the over-55s are starting to [URL="http://www.businessinsider.com/people-over-55-are-quitting-facebook-2009-5"]desert Facebook[/URL]. There could be a number of reasons for this. The best guesses I've seen mostly involve money. This time last year you might recall …

[ATTACH=right]16127[/ATTACH]Would Twitter be nearly as popular if users had to pay for it? Not likely. In fact in a recent [URL="http://www.digitalcenter.org/"]survey conducted by the USC Annenberg School's Center for the Digital Future [/URL]found that nearly half of all Americans use Twitter and they wouldn't be willing to pay for it …

A blogger for liberal sites such as AlterNet and News Junkie Post has [URL="http://blogs.alternet.org/oleoleolson/2010/08/05/massive-censorship-of-digg-uncovered/"]reported [/URL]discovering a conservative group of online users who systematically work together to bury, or vote down, stories on liberal subjects and by posters they believe to be liberal, in order to keep those stories from becoming …

[ATTACH=RIGHT]16390[/ATTACH][URL="http://fflick.com"]Fflick[/URL], a just-launched site that is the brainchild of former Digg employees Ron Gorodetzky, Marc Hemeon, Kurt Wilms, and Dav Zimak, hopes to harness the power of Twitter for good...or finding good movies, at any rate. Fflick allows the user to sign in with their Twitter account and find out …

A lawsuit filed against Facebook in 2008 has had its day in court -- and lost. [ATTACH=RIGHT]16247[/ATTACH]Ohio-based [URL="http://www.leader.com/"]Leader Technologies[/URL] filed suit against Facebook, charging that it had infringed on their 2006 patent for "a method and system for the management and storage of electronic information” developed by the company's founder, …

For those of you living with sheets over your windows for the better half of the last year, the record-setting opening day release of Modern Warfare 2 would only be a sign of things to come for a game that would go on to gross over $1 billion dollars since …

[ATTACH=RIGHT]16251[/ATTACH]Artist Andy Warhol declared in 1968, "In the future , everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes." And now [URL="http://www.youtube.com"]YouTube's[/URL] working to make that a little more possible. The popular video site is increasing its limits on the size of uploaded videos from 10 minutes to 15. Joshua Siegel, Product …

With a fanship of over half a million people strong morbidly updating us about going to the gym and how they’re about to eat dinner semi-colon right bracket, Facebook's dominance seems untouchable, as they relish on their throne as the Wal-Mart of social networking. That is, until you mention Google. …

[ATTACH=right]16243[/ATTACH]Foursquare is so hung up on where we are now or where we've been... Never fear, [URL="http://plancast.com"]Plancast[/URL] is here to fill the void in the location-based future social networking space. Actually, it's much cooler than that, and it's beginning to pick up steam. As its name infers, Plancast is all …

[ATTACH=right]16222[/ATTACH]A new Facebook feature is gearing up to waste more of your time very soon. Facebook Questions has been launched in a limited beta test, naturally begging the important question, "What the Heck is Facebook Questions?" We looked to the [URL="http://blog.facebook.com/"]Facebook blog[/URL] for answers: [QUOTE]Facebook Questions helps you tap into …

The University of Central Florida is currently knee deep in $434,000 of federal tax money programming a video game for teenage girls which acclimates them to the pressures of sexual advances in social environments. Working with UCF’s Institute for Stimulation and Training, Dr. Anne Norris, statistician and methodologist for the …

Nobody should have any reason to wish the fledgeling [URL="http://www.hmvdigital.com"]HMVDigital[/URL] music store, launching today, anything but the best of luck (unless you're an Apple shareholder). A bad business is in nobody's interests and a competitor to an obvious leader is a good thing. On the surface many of the omens …

The troubled newspaper industry has been railing for years about how the Internet is destroying their business model, and taking actions such as paywalls and talking about [URL="http://www.daniweb.com/news/story220640.html"]changing [/URL]copyright law. Now, one newspaper is going further -- it's taking bloggers that posted its stories to court, with the result that …

I write like Dan Brown. At least, that's according to the I Write Like [URL="http://iwl.me/"]site[/URL], which was sweeping the Intertubes yesterday (more than 100,000 [URL="http://www.codingrobots.com/blog/2010/07/14/100000-in-one-day/"]hits [/URL]in a single day) as people tried to find out which Famous Writer their deathless prose most resembled. (Brown is the critically slammed author of[I] …

If you're a woman, it'll tick you off. If you're a man, hopefully it'll educate you. It's "My Fault I'm Female," or "[URL="http://myfaultimfemale.wordpress.com/"]MFIF[/URL]" for short, a compendium of everyday horror stories from women about how they've been treated on the job, by public servants, and by their family. It's also …

The 48,727 [URL="http://twitter.com/nasa_astronauts"]followers of the NASA Astronaut account on Twitter[/URL] expect to hear about updates on astronaut activity and get some personal insight from the astronauts themselves. They probably were not expecting to be bombarded by spacemen offering to sell them plasma and LCD flat-screen TVs at bargain prices however. …

[URL="http://www.virginmedia.com/"]Virgin Media[/URL] will be trying something new in October when it teams up with publishing company [URL="http://www.sevensquared.co.uk/"]Seven Squared[/URL] to launch its first magazine, [I]Maverick[/I]. However, it's moving ahead of its print competitors already, by opting to go electronic rather than create a dead tree version. The first version will be …

[ATTACH=right]15944[/ATTACH]Earlier today, Amazon announced pretty significant numbers that illustrate the rising popularity of e-books. For the first time in their short history, they are outselling their hardcover brethren at the bookstore giant. For the second quarter of 2010, Amazon sold an impressive 143 e-books for every 100 hardcover copies. Change …

Blogetery.com, a free WordPress blog provider, was shut down earlier this month when their [URL="http://www.daniweb.com/news/story297729.html"]entire server was mysteriously yanked [/URL]without warning or explanation. When the site went dark, over 73,000 user generated blogs disappeared and since then there has been little to no information as who was responsible for pulling …

On Friday, July 9th 2010 Blogetery.com went dark and over 73,000 user generated blogs disappeared without warning, without notice...and without any explanation whatsoever. Blogetery.com hosted thousands of WordPress based blogs that suddenly disappeared when their host, BurstNet abruptly pulled the plug in what has become one of the current mysteries …

Gentlemen, your suspicions have been confirmed - your lady/girlfriend/wife [I]is[/I] addicted to Facebook. [ATTACH=right]15821[/ATTACH]That's the finding in a new survey of 18-to-34-year-old ladies by Oxygen Media (think Oprah). It found that over a third of the 1600 women polled - 39% to be exact - describe themselves as "addicted" to …

[ATTACH=right]14514[/ATTACH]So you want your company to be innovative like Google. You want to have a lab and a constant flow of ideas, but you don't know where to begin. In an entertaining speech the other day at the [URL="http://www.aiimexpo.com/"]AIIM 2010 conference [/URL]in Philadelphia, [URL="http://www.cyrusmistry.com/"]Cyrus Mistry[/URL] from Google explained some the …

Viral videos are usually a great laugh, which is why they spread so quickly and the reason they get called viral in the first place. But the laughter soon stops when the bad guys use the lure of a viral video to launch a clickjacking attack. [attach]15852[/attach]Security researchers at Sophos …

[I]"The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, …

Hackers have targeted Justin Bieber videos on YouTube, exploiting a cross-site scripting vulnerability which enabled them to bombard viewers with pop-up messages and redirect them to porn sites. The hack attack lasted for the best part of two hours before Google was able to isolate the problem and apply a …

[ATTACH=LEFT]15813[/ATTACH]Twitter has an undeniable presence on the 'net and has grown into one of the most popular forms of social networking. People still hold on to their blogs for dear life, but some users have opted to switch to Twitter exclusively. TwitVid is attempting to uproot the ad-world, similar in …

In a twist of Internet fate, [URL="http://www.facebook.com"]Facebook[/URL] creator and owner Mark Zuckerberg finds himself as defendant in a lawsuit over the Facebook's majority ownership. Paul Ceglia claims that he entered into a contract, signed by both himself and Zuckerberg, that sold 50 percent of facebook.com to Ceglia for $1,000. Ceglia …

A handful of folks in Brooklyn may have found a way to put the idea of virtual communities and social networks to use in a practical way. Think Foursquare combined with the utility of commuting, as one organizer put it. Roadify is described as "the first comprehensive 'social transportation' company, …

[ATTACH=RIGHT]15743[/ATTACH]Months after its release, with over 3 million units already sold, Apple's iPad was still eliciting excitement among consumers of all ages during a recent visit to an Apple store in West Nyack, NY. Such a high-level of consumer engagement combined with Apple's notorious reputation for tightly controlled user environments …

[URL="http://www.facebook.com"]Facebook[/URL] has decided to kill off its virtual gifts. According to a report from [URL="http://mashable.com/2010/07/08/facebook-gifts-rip/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Mashable+%28Mashable%29"]Mashable[/URL] nobody is saying why, they're just cutting it out. I'll tell you why. Because it was a rubbish idea, poorly executed. OK, rephrase: as a standalone idea, it sucked. As a component of something else …

[ATTACH=RIGHT]15745[/ATTACH]Recent buzz centers around Facebook and Google interactions ever since [URL="http://www.skepticgeek.com/socialweb/googlers-take-on-social-networking-reveals-chinks-in-facebooks-armor/"]a presentation by Paul Adams, the user research lead of Google’s social team[/URL], revealed some of Google’s plans for social networking. In the presentation, Google sets out how it defines social and demonstrates why that definition showcases Facebook’s biggest weakness. …

In a recent [URL="http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/jul/05/clay-shirky-internet-television-newspapers"]interview[/URL] with The Guardian, [I][URL="http://www.amazon.com/Cognitive-Surplus-Creativity-Generosity-Connected/dp/1594202532"]Cognitive Surplus[/URL][/I] author, professor and thinker [URL="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clay_Shirky"]Clay Shirky[/URL] talked about the transformative power of social media to put the power to produce content in the hands of every individual. While he acknowledged that sometimes this power produced what is essentially trash, that didn't …

It's an odd thing to say about a business that spends so much of its time online and is so skilled at search, video (through YouTube) and all that stuff. But for me, [URL="http://www.google.com"]Google[/URL] has only half an idea of what it's sitting on and a number of sites out-do …

What do children's book author Beatrix Potter, painter Mary Cassatt, and artist Frida Kahlo have in common? According to one [URL="http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2010/07/06/google-says-the-world-was-made-made-pretty-by-men/"]blogger[/URL], they are the three women -- compared with 109 men -- who have been honored by having a Google logo designed for them that is used on the worldwide …

Occasionally something crops up as a classic example of how not to build a social media network, and the BBC's decision to insult its [URL="http://www.facebook.com"]Facebook[/URL] fans is a good example. The idea was to put a dummy site up as a test run for the London Olympics - they're a …

The news - or rather unsubstantiated reports - that Apple is developing an online, cloud version of iTunes can be no surprise to anyone. The surprise, in the light of [URL="http://www.spotify.com"]Spotify[/URL], [URL="http://www.sky.com/songs"]Sky Songs[/URL] and other competitors is that Apple hasn't made a move before. You could actually argue that the …

Nick Clegg, Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, has asked the British public to help decide which laws should be repealed by way of what can only be described as an exercise in crowdsourcing via the government sponsored '[URL="http://yourfreedom.hmg.gov.uk/repealing-unnecessary-laws"]Your Freedom[/URL]' website. However, it seems the great British public are …

Thanks to the US dollar getting stronger against the Euro as the European debt crisis takes hold, and shows no signs of weakening for the remainder of the year, so the outlook for IT spending growth looks dim. So dim, in fact, that Gartner analysts have cut back the worldwide …

[I]I like baseball, movies, good clothes, fast cars... and you. What else you need to know? ~Johnny Depp playing John Dillinger in the movie Public Enemies[/I] I love that quote from the movie [URL="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1152836/"]Public Enemies[/URL]. Everything you want to know about a guy in one sentence. If you think about …