Influx

Yesterday, Wal-Mart made an acquisition of a company One Riot. It’s a purchase that could easily escape most people’s radar, since the company is tiny and focused in a very specialized area. On paper, the company is in the mobile space and provides ad targeting technology, but if you...

The personal motivation business is worth billions of dollars; every bookstore you go to has acres of space devoted to it. People are obsessed with better understanding themselves and trying to set clear goals in their personal and business lives. It’s a like dieting, but for the mind; there are...

This might be the start of some kind of series with the idea being to fish out from the internet universe’s thousands of headlines that come to our attention every week, a handful that seem strike us as especially interesting. 1. New York Times adds 281k digital subscribers last quarter via...

Mark Cuban has a good post about ESPN's struggles to take control of breaking sports news.He suggests that despite massive efforts from journalists at ESPN who are using  Twitter, they aren't really winning the battle and the threat is putting advertising dollars at risk. "Today, sports news...

Netbase is one of dozens of companies that measure social media. They out together a handy graphic to measure what they define as "brand passion" based out of social conversations.What's interesting to see in the tech space is how not unexpectedly, Apple and Twitter dominate the passion zone and to...

There are a couple of interesting examples of the emergence of Twitter as a tool for creative collaboration.Mike Skinner- a UK musician and the man behind The Streets, is actively using Twitter as a tool for song ideas and inspiration as The Guardian reports."The new Streets website – which...

There was a time when products were launched after first being seeded with the cool kids in NYC and LA, but as we know, the world is now post-geographic. Cool communities no longer exist just in physical spaces, they can be found clustered together virtually. Geography is the way we tend to orient...

There's a great film going around the web right now, that's basically a recruitment ad for Twitter. It's probably the first piece of communication the brand has done and it gives a real flavor of the place, it's people and its culture. It's also pretty cool, ripping off a scene from the movie...

There was a time when independent movies and music occupied a niche, it was the world that wasn't part of the mainstream and it was where you went to look to find the cool stuff. Sometime around the mid-90s all that changed and independent became mass. The same thing is happening in the world...

Old Spice's advertising has been widely recognized as some of the best stuff out there and generated huge talk value, YouTube video views and the rest. It's been great, but it followed the traditional campaign formula, that 's until now, in the last couple of days, the campaign has made a dramatic...

We are hearing reports of 11% CTRs for the first wave of Apple iAds that have appeared on various applications, then there's this from foursquare.." our friends at Monique’s Chocolates in Palo Alto have acquired over 50 new customers and saw well over 100 redemptions as a result of running a...

I just spotted this Tweet from NPR.    "What it feels like to be bitten by an army ant.....(by our guest tomorrow Mark Moffett aka @doctorbugs."For anyone tuning into the stream of posts from NPR, this is just one Tweet of hundreds that get sent out a week and it seems all...

Twitter might be the brand with optimum buzz at the moment, but it's not enough to take the brand to the next level. With Twittergate last July, a number of sensitive documents were "stolen" including one that defined the company's mission which is "to be the pulse of the planet". Judging by some...

Twitter just released its list of leading trending topics for 2009. Taking a look at the technology list and its surprising to see Google Wave topping the list and the Palm Pre come in at no6. While both these products generated conversation, they can hardly be called massive successes. It goes to...

The story of Twitter's logo appeared in Wired a few days back, the basics of the story suggesting that Twitter paid no more than $6 for its identity. In a word where product performance trumps image, this is going to be par for the course for many a new brand starting out. The reality that logos...