Posts Tagged 'Apple'

How old is the average Facebook user

An infographic from Flowtown (via Alex Wilhelm) points towards the shift in              demographics on the most popular social sites and how older users are upping their presence. 47% of internet users aged 50-64 are now using social networking sites. Average ages of Twitter and Facebook users may be older than you’d expect at 39 and 38 respectively. Click on the image to enlarge and view the full findings.

London Fashion Week Online

Not got the necessary blogging/blagging power to bag yourself a London Fashion Week ticket this year? Never fear; The British Fashion Council is launching an online initiative, Digital Schedule,  for the Autumn/Winter show. Audiences will be able to view shows streamed live from the British Fashion Councils show venue at Somerset House, as well as a selection of fashion films, fast becoming a popular medium for designers to present their collections to new audiences and industry professionals. Designers presenting their films include Antoni & Alison, Cassette Playa and Sienna Miller’s label, Twenty8Twelve. London Fashion Week, kicking off today, is the first of the four global fashion weeks to fully embrace digital media offering all designers the opportunity to live stream their shows and will be driving audiences to the Digital Schedule through e-marketing, Facebook and Twitter.

Thy Pingdom Come

Apple’s music-based social network is pretty much what you’d expect. Through your personal profile, you can follow artists and friends and find out what they’re playing and where they’re playing it, and keep up to date with what friends, artists and celebrities are up to on the Recent Activity feed.
Early uptake showed promised with 1m users subscribed to Ping in two days – which of course is a mere ripple in the water when compared, for example, to the number of Facebook users, but give it time and its likely to rub MySpace and Facebook up the wrong way, with it’s ready made wide reach through iTunes, major artists on board and an ever so slightly well established brand behind it. Opinion of the folk here at Pancentric is well and truely split. Showing no love for the new service John says  “Ping only shows songs you have purchased through iTunes, not those in your full library which you might have got through…..other means. Bit of a fail. Last FM manages track identification though, it’s definitely doable. I just want iTunes to manage my music and deal with my phone/iPod. Not be a second rate social network”. James adds “the charging of Artists to get on there just re-inforces the current broken system. Esp. as there is so much better stuff out there on the social networks anyway.” Conversley Paul reackons “It’s only the first steps, but if enough artists get involved to tempt people into purchasing their music and endorse new artists, then that’s a positive”. What did you think of it?

Is web dead?

‘The web is dead. Long live the internet’ is a provocative statement to say the least but as Wired observes the advent of apps means a new paradigm in the way we consume information. When I wake up in the morning, I pick up my iPhone and click on my app to view Facebook, quickly check over my emails via my gmail app then check the news via my BBC news app – that’s 3 apps before I’ve even eaten my cornflakes and I’m not alone. Come the end of the day and a bunch of apps later as Wired say ‘you’ve spent the day on the internet – but not on the web…Over the past few years, one of the most important shifts in the digital world has been the move from the wide-open Web to semiclosed platforms that use the Internet for transport but not the browser for display. It’s driven primarily by the rise of the iPhone model of mobile computing.” Yet apps – which account for a  small part of the internet- aside, is this really all that new? The web is only web and most of your stuff goes over the internet (email, rss, ftp, bit torrent, iplayer etc.) already. The  read the rest of the article, take a look here.

Hurrah, TV catch-up on your iPhone!

As of autumn we will be able to catch that missed episode of Neighbours on the bus on the way to work, as Five are to launch a TV VOD app to coincide with their Demand Five relaunch. Sky launched their live TV app last November and app’s became available to remotely record programmes on your Sky Plus from your iPhone,  but Five will host the first video on demand app. They look set to beat the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 to have a catch-up app on the iPhone along with the iPad, and have new plans for the relaunch including placing the VOD function at the centre of the channel with links so users can share content with friends on Facebook.

Who said the iPad would never catch on?

LG has revealed plans to introduce a thinner, lighter tablet computer running on Google’s Android OS. It is to be launched later this year and leaps on the iPad bandwagon along with Dell and Samsung, offering an alternative to Apple’s monopoly on the keyboard-less PC market. In response to record demand Apple is now producing over 2.3million iPads monthly and a Forrester research report predicts that tablet or slate style computer sales will outsell netbooks by 2012.
Matching the iPad seems a tall feat but there is room for competition. There may be apps available that are prohibited by Apple and a telephone function and removable battery would give a great advantage. As with the iPhone, if you encounter battery issues with the iPad, it is necessary to send the whole device to Apple.

LG boasts it “will deliver vastly superior performance than other similar devices currently on the market while still managing to be thinner and lighter than competing devices.” It’s rumoured LG’s device will use Android OS v2.2 (Froyo) with a 7-inch touchscreen, WVGA resolution, 3G, Wi-Fi and built-in GPS. Samsung previously announced they are working on the Galaxy Tab, a tablet with a 7inch TFT screen also powered by Google’s Android OS.

Watch and learn Prince, Radiohead’s Phil Selway offers his first solo single as a free download

After Prince’s outlandish comment that “The internet is completely over”, Phil Selway, drummer of Radiohead, has followed in his bands footsteps and embraced the internet, offering his first single as a free download. The new track ‘By Some Miracle’ is taken from his debut solo album ‘Familial’, set to be released over the summer. Radiohead caused a sensation in 2007 when they released their Rainbows album online offering fans the chance to pay what they wanted between £0.00 to £99.00. Figures from Comscore show the average amount paid per album download was US$6.00 and despite the free download option, fans bought more than 100,000 copies of the CD within a year. According to Radiohead front man Thom Yorke “In terms of digital income, we’ve made more money out of this record than out of all the other Radiohead albums put together.”

Adding more power to digital’s elbow research sponsored by Microsoft and Intel, for a study entitled ‘The Energy and Climate Change Impacts of Different Music Delivery Methods’, shows downloading is better for the environment than buying CD’s.  All the more reason to embrace digital.

Twitter surpasses Bing as fastest-growing search engine

Brace yourself for some big number crunching – Fast Company brought us news of happenings at the Aspen Ideas Festival where cofounder Biz Stone talks of how Twitter is rapidly establishing itself as a popular search tool, pulling in around 800 million search queries per day. While the news is unlikely to have the daddy of search engines Google quaking in its boots just yet (88 billion searches per month), young Twitter with its 24 billion searches per month is certainly giving the likes of Bing (4.1 billion) and Yahoo (9.4 billion) a run for their money. Not bad considering Twitter is still in its relative infancy – search volumes are up 33% in the last 15 months. Fast Company say “this is something the service has been angling for. Last month, at the the World Innovation Forum, Stone argued that Twitter is “not a social network,” though many people view it as one. “That’s been a myth since the beginning,” he explained. “We’re much more like an information network or a source of news.”

Stuff on the web we think you might like…

Street Museum iPhone app: This clever app uses augmented reality, geo tagging and Google Maps to overlay a historical view of London over your real-world street scene. We couldn’t resist having a play, the above pic is round the corner from Pancentric Towers by the Thames.

Pixelise the world: Stunningly imaginative video illustrating the world as it would be if infiltrated by pixels.

So That’s How They Filmed the Star Wars Opening Crawl: For a film that was light year’s ahead the filming techniques for the opening crawls were ‘wonderfully quaint.’

How to suck at Facebook: The Oatmeal brings you the best of Facebook faux-pas. Laugh-your-socks-off stuff.

Accepting meetings honestly: Imagine if you could express or see how people felt about coming or going to meetings.

Google world domination, starting with your TV

Combining the best aspects of television and the web, Google have announced the launch of their TV box set. The platform opens up your TV to millions of channels of entertainment, type in what you’re looking for and Google will help you find it on the web or on TV channels. Alternatively, if you just want to browse, you can use your standard program guide, your DVR or the Google TV home screen. Check the latest pop video’s on Youtube, show friends your photo’s or play online games, all on your big shiny 50 inch plasma screen.

Sky are rumoured to be interested in having Sky TV on the Google TV set, and Sony and Logitech are due to be the first to integrate Google TV into their devices. Sony announced production of TV’s and Blu-Ray DVD player’s with Google TV built in, while Logitech have plans to introduce an HDTV camera and video chat, along with apps to turn a smart phone into an advanced remote control. We need never leave the sofa again.

New Facebook privacy settings

In the wake of mounting public concern and a media backlash, Facebook have announced their new and improved privacy settings, releasing a detailed list of the proposed changes. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has already admitted in his Washington Post column that they ‘missed the mark’ with changes in privacy settings last December,  but comments that users will now be offered simpler privacy settings to give them more control over their personal information. They have acknowledged that their 50 privacy settings and 170 privacy options can be confusing for users.

The unpopular changes made in December 2009, dubbed The Great Facebook Betrayal by Gawker, removed the ability to hide your profile pictures, fan pages and network membership from all strangers. They also allowed advertisers within Facebook to trace back to individual users every time they followed a link to their ad, and due to the changes in privacy settings an increasing amount of user’s personal information was shared on the site by default. Check out this video of Mashable’s Pete Casmore discussing Facebook’s response to the user backlash.

A milestone moment

Apple has taken over Microsoft as the biggest tech company, pushing past its biggest Rival Microsoft. While Microsoft remains the highest profit making of the two companies, Apple is leading the way in terms of share price value thanks to the introduction of iPods, iPhones and iPads. Now, depending on your interpretation of the stats, you could see this as Apple taking nearly 20 years to get back to the position it held in 1989…