Blog Archives

Latest Posts

Monthly

Categories

All Posts in

February 15, 2014 — Published by: Charlie Gregory

Instagram registers 15x more engagement than Facebook

instagram_heart1

L2 Think Tank has  released a report outlining that Instagram is set to outstrip its veteran social media counterparts due mainly to it being an "evolved form of window shopping", according to Luxury Daily.

“The speed with which prestige brands have flocked to Instagram has been surprising,” said Danielle Bailey, research lead at L2, New York. The report with Olapic evaluates the performance and programming of 249 prestige brands on the platform.

With the social network extremely easily lending itself to ecommerce with brands, it's easy to see why the success of this will prevail over other more text-based networks, such as Twitter or Facebook. With 93% of the 249 brands actively using the medium, 43% post more than once per day and 72% are now producing Instagram videos.

Read more here.

 

January 27, 2014 — Published by: Charlie Gregory

The Billion Dollar Club

Screenshot 2014-01-27 12.20.29

Above are the Top 5 companies on the Wall Street Journal's Billion-Dollar Club, published as of January 2014.

Both the Journal itself and Dow Jones Venture Source are tracking companies that are valued at $1bn or more by venture-capital firms. If you head to the website, you can interact with the graph of over 30 companies, looking at what each does, when it was founded, and where it is based in a profile breakdown. Some high profile names are in there - Dropbox, Spotify and Pinterest, to name a few - whilst one of the youngest on the list is SnapChat, valued at $2bn.

Only three of these companies are European; which shows us that the money is largely invested in the East and the US. And over a third having been founded in the last five years, it'll be interesting to see where technology will take us - and investors' money - over the next five.

January 23, 2014 — Published by: Charlie Gregory

The ‘infectious disease’ that is Facebook

2014-01-23 16.52.23

When a user slowly becomes immune to its actions and attractions, a group of researchers at Princeton University predict that 80% of Facebook's users will have abandoned the site by 2017.

John Cannarella and Joshua Spechler based their research on the number of times 'Facebook' was entered into Google. Google Trends' chart show that the searches peaked in late 2012 but have begun to trail off since.

"Ideas, like diseases, have been shown to spread infectiously between people before eventually dying out, and have been successfully described with epidemiological models,"

the authors claim in a paper entitled 'Epidemiological modelling of online social network dynamics'.

When researching, Spechler and Cannarella used the SIR (susceptible, infected, recovered) model of disease, which creates equations to map the spread and recovery of epidemics.

Also, as part of the paper, they tested various equations against the lifespan of Myspace. Myspace was founded in 2003 and reached its peak in 2007 with 300 million registered users, before falling out of use by 2011. With that as a base, they then adapted their findings to Facebook.

The 870 million people using Facebook via their smartphones each month could explain the drop in Google searches – those looking to log on are no longer doing so by typing the word into Google. But Facebook's CFO David Ebersman admitted on an earnings call with analysts that during the previous three months:

"We did see a decrease in daily users, specifically among younger teens."

Perhaps without innovation, Facebook's days are numbered.

January 16, 2014 — Published by: Charlie Gregory

Step 1 of Sentience: Give Robots Their Own Internet

..yes. It's true. According to the BBC and Independent, scientists at Eindhoven University in Holland are today launching RoboEarth, a prototype cloud engine for robots. Through this 'internet' of sorts, they can learn and share their independent knowledge with others.

On the site, RoboEarth announced: “These robots will use RoboEarth as a knowledge base, communication medium, and computational resource to offload some of their heavy computation.”

To begin with, four robots are going to be linked across the system, and put into a mock hospital room in the Dutch university, analysed on how they care for their 'patient'. If successful, it could be a big step towards robotic carers for the elderly and disabled.

Let's just hope that those helping the hindered don't get too smart and start acting like this rather evil fellow below...

HAL

November 5, 2013 — Published by: Charlie Gregory

Now introducing…Biebernet?

Launching later this week, Shots Of Me is a new teen-focussed social network from the makers of social mobile games under the RockLive brand. Though the launching of such social networks is never really that surprising nowadays, eyebrows were raised at one of Shots Of Me's investors: that of Justin Bieber.

In a story on Fortune's website, we see that the global superstar - with over 45 million followers on Twitter let's not forget - recently led a $1.1m seed round for the company, alongside angel investor Tom McInerney and boxer Floyd Mayweather.

That the Twitter following behind the 19-year-old singer is so vast is excellent news for RockLive; as a tradition, the company has not used any official press releases to promote its games, instead letting digital word of mouth do the talking. This we like.

So, we'll just have to wait and see whether one tweet from Bieber will make all the difference for Shots Of Me.

October 4, 2013 — Published by: Charlie Gregory

What does the media think of Twitter? [GRAPHIC]

What does the media really think of Twitter? Twitter's in all the headlines today, so we just thought we would do some work on something that caught our eye in the wake of the company filing for a $1bn IPO.

Quartz has posted a piece on the "complete history of Twitter as told through tortured descriptions of it in the New York Times". In this piece, Quartz researched and listed - extensively - every time the social network had been effectively "@'ed" by the newspaper throughout its seven-year history.

Most of us online know how word clouds work - those words that are bigger are ones that have been used the most often, and vice versa. So we put together all the statements in the Quartz post, and made the below graphic.

Twitter NYT Descriptions

Good old Larry bird.

As you can see, the five biggest words are - in usage order - "service", "users", "social", "short" and "site". So, it's a short social service site for its users.

And we think that pretty much covers it. Thank you Quartz for doing some great investigative work to find all the mentions of our favourite social network in the first place.