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After the advent of the Apple’s App Store in 2008, the word “app”; shorthand for “application”, took off and became wildly popular for mobile applications. On the technical side of it, an application is a computer program designed to help people perform an activity or tasks more efficiently. They have become a filter to our world under the mobile market.

Through apps, we can now access information, games, and entire virtual worlds without manually going into the browser and searching for it. Almost everything now has an app related to it, just like how Apple says it, “There’s an app for that.”

However, for the app market, we can’t deny that Apple has a huge advantage over it by boasting more than 225,000 apps under their App store. With that number of apps, over 4 billion of them have been downloaded so far.

On the other hand, Google’s Android platform has been gaining serious steam over the past few months. Numbers are up all around, and clearly more people are staying interested. Our recent look at Android 2.2 makes us confident that Google is in the mobile OS space for the long-haul, and it’s becoming clear that consumers are interested in staying loyal to the OS, too. According to the latest number, the Android App Market has over 70,000 applications available.

Considering that Android launched about a year after the original iPhone, the numbers are pretty darn impressive. On top of that, with the help of our friends over at OnlineSchools, they have come up with another awesome infographic on the topic of apps. I hope you’ll find the information useful!

Via: MBA Online

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

Facebook may be the biggest social networking site up to date with more than 400 million active users but it has met criticism on a range of issues, especially the privacy of their users, child safety, the use of advertising scripts, data mining, and the inability to terminate accounts without first manually deleting all the content.

In their defence, here’s what Facebook’s COO Shery Sandberg has to say:

“Mark really does believe very much in transparency and the vision of an open society and open world, and so he wants to push people that way. I think he also understands that the way to get there is to give people granular control and comfort. He hopes you’ll get more open, and he’s kind of happy to help you get there. So for him, it’s more of a means to an end. For me, I’m not as sure.”

To simplify things, it means that anyone has the ability to sieve through the content of public Facebook updates using their own search service. It works the same way as Twitter’s search service on the main website itself.

By inputting keywords on the respective search services of each site, normal users like us are able to track down what people are saying about your brand or businesses. The site, OpenBook, developed by Will Moffat, Peter Burns and James Home lets us do exactly the above statement on Facebook.

Even though the site’s purpose is to ridicule Facebook’s privacy policy, I believe it may prove to be useful for marketers who want to find out what the buzz is on their brand or businesses. Share with us your stand on the site, we’re looking forward to hearing from you!

Ready, camera, action! Call me a slow burner, but I have only started following the developments of ‘The Social Network’ after their first full theatrical trailer was published on Yahoo Movies. In case you’re wondering what I’m talking about, the movie re-enacts the story about the founders of Facebook with a befitting tagline, “You don’t get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies.”

In any case, I’ll admit that when I first heard that a movie about the creation of Facebook was in the works, I was unconvinced that it wouldn’t be much of a dramatic interest to draw a large-scale audience into watching a bunch of college-age code monkeys develop a revolutionary way to kill time on our computers.

However, my initial thoughts were immediately thrown out the door after watching the trailer. Before anyone starts shooting the movie down by saying that Hollywood is just milking the trend of social networking, here’s my interpretation of the movie from the trailer.

What I Have To Say

The gist of the story harbours around the unethical Mark Zuckerberg instead of a PR piece for the creator or the site. The use of “Creep” and the attention to the antics of the guys who created it, not to mention the self-indulgent nature of those who stay on it and the fact that it’s a social network for people who don’t really get out and talk to real people that much, highlight the fact that the filmmakers aren’t really saying it’s wonderful but actually kind of sad.

What the Founders Have To Say

Both Facebook’s co-founders Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moscovitz have expressed some measure of disapproval where the highly anticipated film The Social Network is concerned. Here are Moscovitz’s thoughts from the site itself:

It is interesting to see my past rewritten in a way that emphasizes things that didn’t matter (like the Winklevosses, who I’ve still never even met and had no part in the work we did to create the site over the past 6 years) and leaves out things that really did (like the many other people in our lives at the time, who supported us in innumerable ways). Other than that, it’s just cool to see a dramatization of history.

I’m very curious to see how Mark turns out in the end – the plot of the book/script unabashedly attack him, but I actually felt like a lot of his positive qualities come out truthfully in the trailer (soundtrack aside). At the end of the day, they cannot help but portray him as the driven, forward-thinking genius that he is. And the Ad Board *does* owe him some recognition, dammit.

What Do You Have To Say?

I bet that you’re eager to watch the trailer right now, for those who have not seen it, here it is!

After watching the trailer, what do you have to say about The Social Network? Do share with us by dropping a comment because we are equally excited to hear your thoughts on the movie!

Image via Wikipedia

Facebook is a place to communicate with friends and family, to share awesome links you find on the Web, to play social games, search for long-lost friends or even chat interactively with your buddies but more and more marketers are taking advantage of it to leverage their businesses on this massive social networking site.

You might just wonder how many of these businesses are on Facebook and at the same time, the number of those that are not. Fret not, a recent survey of 476 marketers conducted by SeeWhy showed us that over three-quarters; 76%, of them plan to use Facebook to drive sales as part of their social media strategy.

A further 20% are not yet sure, while only 2% have no plans to leverage Facebook for social commerce. For those that are planning to use Facebook as part of their marketing strategy, here’s a breakdown of the different usage:

Conclusion

As a digital marketing enthusiast myself, I’ve never come across another website like Facebook that positively boosts the traffic of the business that’s using it. The same could be said for companies that screwed up like how Tiger Airways does selective listening and the revolting way Nestle reacted when they came under attack from Greenpeace.

However with that said, that doesn’t necessarily mean that every business should be on Facebook for the sake of it. I believe that every single one of them needs to have a purpose that they wish to accomplish when they’re on the massive social networking site; drive more traffic to their own site, a gateway for customer feedback or even a place to congregate your brand followers.

Image via Wikipedia

A journey of a thousand sites begins with a single click.

Since its beginning until now, the Internet has exponentially grown into something that has a profound impact on our work, knowledge, worldviews and daily lives. Reports like users spending more than 25 hours a month on Facebook; a single website, leaves us wondering the amount of time we spent on the Net.

By now, we should clearly know that it is practically impossible to measure the amount of information on the Internet because almost everything could be found online with the click of a button. We can only wonder how huge the Net could be if it is available in a physical form.

Thanks to our dear friends at OnlineSchools, they have come up with a new infographic to showcase the top 15 facts about the Internet today.

If there’s one thing not to do online is never plagiarize the works of others because it is far too easy to get caught. Apparently a large government organization fails to abide to the above regulation and rips off the design and artwork of another international organization; Twitter.

The Fail Whale has been an endearing placeholder image used by Twitter on its homepage when the site is down due to an overloaded server or maintenance. Here’s a brief description of it:

When Twitter experiences an outage, users see the “fail whale” error message image created by Yiying Lu, illustrating several red birds using a net to hoist a whale from the ocean captioned “Too many tweets! Please wait a moment and try again.”

Here’s SMRT’s version of their “Go Green With SMRT” ad:

Before I begin on the uncanny resemblances, I would like to say that this is obviously an ass of an idea by combining a negative image into your organization. Is SMRT trying to say that their passengers should be cautious of their transportation service? Or are they saying that their public transports are prone to breakdowns? You get my point.

Here’s a response from their PR team on their Facebook page:

So inspiration nowadays is equivalent to plagiarism? What a load of bullshit.

PS: I know that this was big news about a week ago but due to my busy schedule, I’ve only been able to come around to posting the news here only today, I apologize for the delay.

About a month ago, I was invited to attend a bloggers’ preview on Standard Chartered’s new mobile banking iPhone application, Breeze, at the The Queen and Mangosteen at Vivocity. To be honest, I’m not a fan of mobile banking, having used POSB’s prior to this event. However, this application introduced by Standard Chartered, possesses a few ingenious plus points over their counterparts; especially their e-cheque function.

According to the developers, here’s a short introduction of what Breeze is about:

Breeze was designed with two things in mind; the iPhone, and you. With Breeze, you can see, move and manage your money anytime, anywhere. It combines an intuitive interface with a robust set of features, which means you get the best of both worlds: simplicity and power.

Here’s how the splash screen greeting users look like:

Login

The four big buttons are unpretentious and does what it says immediately after clicking on it. As for the first button, users are able to log into their mobile banking account by using the same log-in credentials as what they are using for the website banking; no need for unnecessary additional accounts.

After about a month of using it, I’m amazed that the application is able to carry out almost all of the functions that the website banking is able to do except for the ability to add accounts to transfer your money to which can only be done on the website itself.

One of the most unique functions would be the e-cheque function. From the application itself, I am able to send out cheques to anyone whom I’ve connected an account with my Standard Chartered bank account at any point of time.

Locate

As a Standard Chartered user for months, I do understand the frustration when it comes to finding ATM machines so that I’m able to withdraw or deposit money physically. The application uses your current location to seek the nearest Standard Chartered ATM and branch locations. With this function present within the application itself, it has helped me tremendously in finding an ATM machine, especially when I’m out with my friends.

If you would like to try out this application, you can get your hands on it here! On top of that, a new version of the app would be coming soon; dubbed the Typhoon, watch out for that.

Disclaimer: I was provided with an iPod Touch to review Breeze in any way that I deem fit.

Image via Wikipedia

Never gonna give you up,

Never gonna let you down

Never gonna run around and desert you

Never gonna make you cry,

Never gonna say goodbye

Never gonna tell a lie and hurt you.

I’m sure everybody has come across the above lyrics when they’re surfing the Web at some point of their live. The term for it is called ‘Rickrolling’; an Internet meme typically involving the music video for the 1987 Rick Astley song “Never Gonna Give You Up”.

The meme is typically a bait and switch phenomenon where a person provides a web link that they claim is relevant to the topic at hand, but the link actually takes the user to the Astley video. The link can be masked or disguised in some manner so that the user cannot determine the true destination of the link without clicking. When a person clicks on the link and is led to the web page, he or she is said to have been “rickrolled”.

The awesome people at OnlineSchools decided to create a phenomenal infographic, running through the history of Rickrolling. Honestly, who hasn’t been tricked into seeing the video before? Do raise your hand up.

Here’s a video of the song to refresh your memory!

It was recently announced by GetJar; the world’s largest cross platform app store, that the web and mobile messaging service provided eBuddy has surpassed the 50 million download marks for its eBuddy Mobile Messenger app. At the time of writing this article, the number shown stands at 50,655,934 downloads up to date.

With that massive milestone reached, eBuddy now joins the ranks of Facebook as the second mobile app to reach 50 million downloads on GetJar. Facebook in the meanwhile has about 61,349,719 downloads up to date.

eBuddy says this pay-per-download solution helped making GetJar its number one external source for downloads, particularly in key countries like India (GetJar’s solution allows developers to geo-target campaigns by country, handset or even carrier), although most of its growth is organic.

From the looks of how things are unfolding, mobile usage is indeed growing at a rapid rate amongst Web users. The previous statement is further supported by a report from Quantcast 2 months ago, where they predicted that mobile web will supersede desktop Internet by 2015.

As for advertisers, here’s a previous month’s post on how effective is mobile advertising; if they wish to go into that area.

According to Google’s Doubleclick Ad Planner 1000 list, Facebook is the leading website in the world, reaching 540 million unique users, good for over 35% of the entire world’s Internet population through the whole month of April. The social networking giant also racked up 570 billion page views, topping the list.

Despite being the butt of countless privacy debacles, Facebook still tops the Internet traffic from all businesses with 6.8% of the 13 billion URLs analyzed going to their site.

This list tracks the top 1,000 global Websites ranked by unique users and includes stats on each site’s Web population reach, page views and whether the site has digital advertising. Google, angling for impartiality, did not include any of its properties in the study, which adds on to the credibility of the results.

Yahoo was close behind Facebook, at 490 million unique visitors, reaching 31.8% of the world’s Internet users. In terms of page views, Yahoo could not even compete, as they only managed to choke up 70 billion views on their site.

Microsoft, the company notorious for losing billions with its online services business, actually grabs more traffic combined than any Website in the world; with Live having 370 million unique visitors, Wikipedia having 310 million unique visitors, MSN having 280 million unique visitors and Microsoft.com having 230 million. In terms of page views, Live had 39 billion, Wiki had 7.9 billion, MSN had 11 billion and Microsoft had 3.3 billion.

In order to get the massive numbers, Google culls the data from a number of computer, not human-generated, sources, an important distinction Google likes to make for propriety’s sake. These sources include: data from Google Toolbar users who have opted in to enhanced features, publisher opt-in anonymous Google Analytics data, opt-in external consumer panel data, and other third-party market research.

Check out the image below for the top 25 in the list!