Week 22 : Curated Shorts

Our recent heatwave may now be subsiding but I suppose we can expect nationwide hosepipe bans in the coming weeks … unless it snows. However, the digital world has been suffering a heatwave for ten years (since the last bubble) burst and whilst most of us agree that the latest bubble will go pop soon it will be different to the 2001 bubble in the sense that most companies will survive this time, albeit at lower valuations. It’s a pretty exciting time as many of the big players have converged on social, mobile & patents so are treading all over each others toes, expensively.

Google+ gets a major design overhaul. When Google+ was unveiled in June of last year, it was clear that the company had created its best social networking product to date. Obviously inspired to some extent by Facebook, if Google+ had been launched by a start-up instead of the world’s largest search engine, some pundits might have labelled it a potential threat. And for good reason: there was a lot to like about Google+. [read more]

Tablet Sales Expected to Reach 120 Million This Year. Approximately 119 million tablets will reach consumers’ hands around the world this year, up from 60 million in 2011, according to a forecast released by Gartner Tuesday. The projections are considerably more aggressive than the estimates the research firm released a year ago.

Of those 119 million tablets, approximately 73 million, or 61%, will be iPads, Gartner predicts. The researcher thinks that the Apple device will continue to dominate the tablet market through 2016, despite increased competition [read more]

Sony sheds 10,000 staff in major reorganisation. Electronics firm Sony is to shed 10,000 jobs as part of a major reorganisation, chief executive Kazuo Hirai has said. The cuts, which represent 6% of the global workforce, will be made over the next 12 months. The reduction includes staff working in businesses that are being sold, such as its chemicals division. [read more]

iPhone-Friendly Watch Gets $500,000 Kickstarter Funding in a Day. Hey iPhone users: how many times a day do you take your beloved device out of your pocket just to check the time, change the tune, check email or see who’s calling? What if we wore some kind of notification device on our wrists — let’s call them watches — that could connect to your iPhone to do all of the above and more? And what if it didn’t cost an arm and a leg? We’re sold so invested the $120 to get one of the first release version in Aug or Sep. Are we mad, rushing in to buy version 1?  [read more]

Tracking everything, Placeme is the smartphone assistant of the future. Placeme for iOS and Android may be both the scariest and amazingly futuristic smartphone app I’ve seen yet. The free software uses every sensor in your handset to track your activities, location and environment. There’s no checking in or other action you need to take; Placeme, built by Alohar Mobile, simply records everything in the background. And that creates the fullest set of personalized data I can think of: Placeme is a complete personal tracking solution. [read more]

WordPress completely dominates top 100 blogs. WordPress is no doubt a very popular web publishing platform for blogs and other types of websites. But just how popular is it? We just completed a study and found that WordPress is in use by 48% of the top 100 blogs in the world. This is an increase from the 32% we recorded three years ago.

Other developments since then include that custom blog publishing platforms are more common now, TypePad has all but disappeared from the top 100, Tumblr has made an entrance, and some companies really don’t want to spill the beans about what solutions they use. [read more]

Don’t Collect Customers, Build Communities. As often as it has been said over the past few years most businesses still can’t adapt to the new business landscape. I understand why: There’s a lot to change, and even in the best of circumstances momentum can keep a business heading in the same direction, right or wrong, for years.

Where to start, then? How should businesses acquire customers—or more accurately—how they shouldn’t. Yes momentum ensures businesses continue to market in the same way; continue to advertise in the same way; continue to think in the same way. But customers, both B2B and B2C, don’t have that problem—they are nimble and their choices are many. [read more]

Amazon’s new Cloud Drive rains on everyone’s parade. The internet giant’s online storage service leaves Google, Sony and the rest in a desperate race to catch up. [read more]

Google: a third of people use the mobile web every day. Almost two-thirds of UK smartphone owners (59%) access the mobile internet everyday, according to stats published on Google’s ‘Our Mobile Planet’ site. With smartphone penetration now at 51%, this equates to more than a third of the total UK population using the mobile web on a daily basis.

Google’s industry leader for technology and hardware Simon Morgan used a speech at IAB Mobile Engage to highlight statistics that show the growing importance of mobile for marketing. [read more]

Week Shorts is a curated compendium of interesting news articles compiled at Connected and read by thousands interested in the new media world. Inspired very much by Flipboard and its wonderful ability to bring together all that I find useful in a simple reading format. This is my hackery version of this and showcases what I am reading at the moment and what’s out there. Enjoy!

All the articles are taken from third party sources and links are provided back to see the full article after minor editing and formatting changes. Connected acknowledges the owners of the work and respective copyrights. The article is provided, as-is with no warranty as to its accuracy. Connected cannot control and therefore will not be held liable for the content of third-party web-sites.