Blog
News, insight and tips from the social web.
The Hoop blog covers the evolving digital landscape, social media, mobile communications, content marketing and also includes 5 top finds and Fish on Friday. Feel free to make comments.
-
5 top finds #26 »
A new logo for London 2012, Facebook's mobile phone is apparently a failure (and it's not even finished yet), Google's take on iTunes, i(can't)Message, chasing deer and chasing investment. It's 5 top finds...
1. 2012 gets a facelift
There was quite a bit of consternation when Wolff Olin's logo for London 2012(™) was unveiled in 2007. We were a little surprised to see the consternation continuing – with an alternative logo being submitted to Logo Design Love just last week (with an accompanying dig at Wolff Olin's attempt). venturethree's version is actually rather good!
2. Poor Buffy's not doing so well
There have been rumours drifting around the internet for years about the possibility of Facebook producing a phone. Or rather Facebook writing the software and partnering with a hardware producer like HTC or Samsung to produce a mobile.
Tech blog AllThingsD recently published a story revealing that FB are actually in the process of producing such a phone running on a HTC handset with souped-up Android. Apparently, according to Inside Mobile Apps, things haven't been going smoothly...
But, on a more positive note, all is apparently not lost. The Wall Street Journal is reporting Facebook are looking into filing their elusive IPO "targeting a time frame of April to June 2012 for an initial public offering, said people familiar with the matter" – in which the company is looking to raise $10bn.
Which would value the company at around $100bn...
3. Spinning in control (as long as you live in America)
Google launched their attempt to steal the digital music crown from iTunes (Match) last week. The imaginatively titled (but rather awesome) 'Google Music' lets you upload up to 20,000 of your own tracks to the cloud (for easy listening on any device), share your music tastes via Google+, access your music anywhere and discover new music via the Google Music recommendation system.
Which all sounds great, but it's as of yet unavailable in the UK...
4. To iMessage or not to iMessage
When Apple announced iMessage, their version of Blackberry's BBM service, back at WWDC in June, we all jumped for joy at what we thought would be a (free and) fantastic, SMS-killing service.
But, as is often the way, all is not as magical as first advertised. Entrepreneur Matt Galligan eloquently described what we couldn't. Well worth a read.
5. Chasing deer and rapping for investment
We've two videos in this week's 5 top finds:
1) Benton (no relation to the author, for those of you who were about to ask; who the Sun is reporting is actually called 'Fenton') being admonished – but taking no notice – for taking an afternoon jog with a herd of deer.
2) An intriguing way of marketing your startup and asking for angel investment (but it seems to work).
Categories: 5 top finds
Tags: Apple, #Benton, Buffy, facebook, Google+, iMessage, iPhone, London 2012, Mobile, Music
-
5 top finds #16 »
It's Monday so we've lined up another 5 top finds for your enjoyment. This week sees us exploring photographic innovation; Spotify under the spotlight; the next round of Google v Facebook; Square mobile payments and the Tweet Olympics.
1. Some photography loving
We're huge lovers of photography here at Hoop, so we were bowled away when we stumbled across Dear Photograph. The premise is simple, revisit the location of old photographs and overlay the old with the new. A wonderful idea with superb execution in submissions from all over the world.
We've been talking about the rise of mobile for a while now, and with that we've been keen to follow the rise in popularity of 'iPhoneography' apps like Instagram and Hipstamatic (two of the most popular). We recently noticed this superb Hipstamatic photojournalism experiment from the war in Afghanistan on Foreign Policy – we thoroughly recommend checking it out.
We also found this wonderfully divisive opinion piece on why Instagram is ruining photography the other day – it's an oldie but definitely a goodie.
2. Patent and IP trolls
If you've been following the launch of Spotify in the US, you'll have no doubt heard that even though they've already amassed a reported 70,000 subscribers, they've already run into legal problems – just a week after launch. They've been issued with court papers for patent infringement by a 'wireless multimedia platform creator' called PacketVideo. TechDirt have all the details and you can read the court papers in full here.
This is the latest in the alarming trend of patent and IP shell companies suing the innovative tech companies and developers – a market that's reportedly worth $6bn in litigation fees and $50bn in IP rights and licensing. The Guardian has an interesting article on the influence patents have on innovation. Definitely worth a read.
3. Google+ and Facebook Business
The ominous rivalry between Google and Facebook took an interesting turn this week. Google have been booting company and pseudonym profiles from their new Google+ social network without warning and Facebook were quick to capitalise.
The Palo Alto company launched the new Facebook Business section as an "online education centre" aimed at getting small businesses to utilise Facebook pages, ads, sponsored stories and the social plug-ins. It might not be an obvious swipe at G+ but we reckon it's a swipe nonetheless. GigaOm has the details.
4. Lets all get Square
We love Twitter here at Hoop - and you can find us all (or most of us) on it. So when we heard Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey had started a new venture, we all got a bit excited.
Square is a revolutionary new mobile payment system that turns your iOS or Android device into a cash register and a credit/ debit card reader. It seems we're only ones getting excited about the programme, the company's already shipped almost 350,000 card readers and had $135m transacted through its programme way back in April. Unfortunately, it's not yet available outside of the US but we're sure it will be soon. Pretty damn cool!
5. Olympics competitive tweeting
On July 27th, London 2012 announced the fairly self-explanatory 'One year to go' campaign. Yes, we're only 12 months away from welcoming the Olympics to London and we couldn't be more excited! To celebrate the countdown, London 2012 announced a competition to see which competing country had the biggest social fanbase which is judged by the number of tweets, photos uploaded to flickr and videos to YouTube marked with each country's 3 letter code.
It seems Twitter shares our enthusiasm for the upcoming Olympics. In 48 hours, there have already been 85,853 tweets with the #1yeartogo hashtag, putting the USA at #1 position with 16% of the votes (at the time of writing). Head over to Mashable for more info and get voting!
Categories: 5 top finds
Tags: Apple, facebook, Google+, iPhone, London 2012, Mobile, Patent Law, Photography, Social media, Square, Twitter
