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Graeme Lipschitz: Columnist

Graeme Lipschitz is a Business Development manager at Clicks2Customers.com. He has previously worked for Google UK and Google South Africa as a lead account strategist, growing accounts in the Travel, Finance and Retail sectors.

RECENT POSTS

• Google Knowledge Graph: What questions should we really be asking?

  I don’t get all the fanfare about Google’s recent “Knowledge Graph” launch -- surely it’s just another step on Google’s path of evolving search?First, we had Google’s attempt to show us more than just links with Universal Search in 2007 – that started incorporating aspects like images and news.Secondarily, and totally coincidentally, we had Google Squared which was viewed as more of a computational engine that extracted data from webpages and presented them in search results in a ...

• Who will win the mobile payment wars?

  Mobile payment has been a massive technology talking point over the past two years as hardware manufacturers wizen up to the fact that more can be done with their products and banks realise that going to an ATM or, even worse, the actual branch is not high on their clients' priority list.The uptake in mobile payments is largely Africa’s fault: the majority of people with a mobile phone don’t have access to normal bank accounts; scarcity of resources has led ...

• How Google moved the online advertising goalposts

  The power of digital marketing over its more traditional offline brethren such as TV and Radio has been the measurability of the medium: advertisers can see, down to the penny, what their marketing spend is achieving in terms of impressions, clicks, and ultimately conversions.The particular agency I work for even built with offering clients a performance model based on achieving those conversions at a price that provides high value to the end client as well as a viable income ...

• The sarcasm machine: Measuring sentiment in social media mentions

  At the end of last year, I wrote a few posts on measuring social media, at the time when Google Analytics had recently launched Social Engagement Reporting (SER) in order for site owners to measure the impact of social media mentions in and outside of the website, as well as “real-time” which allowed users to see what was happening on their site at that exact moment. The real glitch, however, was how we expected computers to accurately report on social media metrics ...

• A glance into the future: Google Glass

  Google’s mission to collect all of the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful has been placed under the veritable microscope with the introduction of GlassIn December last year news broke via Mashable and 9to5Google that Google was working on a “top secret” eyewear project in Google X: its clandestine lab of experimentation famously spearheaded by uber-geek and co-founder Sergey Brin. Sceptics might have thought this was the early emergence of one of Google’s fabled April Fools' ...

• Is tweeting profitable?

  The Next Web reportedly recently paid Paris Hilton US$3 000 for a sponsored tweet and while sponsored tweets are nothing new, we've got to wonder how profitable Twitter is both for itself and its users.Barack Obama has often used Twitter to broadcast his feelings on certain topics like tax (#40dollars) and the debt-ceiling (#Compromise) and, as a result, has also used it to drum up support for his re-election in 2012 -- so it clearly has a role to ...

• Growing up Google: 6 pivotal moments that changed Google for the worse

  Leaving Google was a very tough thing to do: the technological innovation remains immense, the people are smart and the perks aren't bad. "Goldman Gate" and James Whittaker's Microsoft Blog rant have, however, raised the level of attention that a company's culture has on how it operates. Whittaker mentions Google pre and post Google+; the truth of the matter is that Google changed culturally long before the launch of its social network. Let's look at some pivotal moments that changed ...

• Hey MXit, where’s the share button?

  MXit, the free instant messaging and social media platform, has been in the news lately, primarily because it was acquired by World of Avatar, a South African investment group lead by Alan Knott Craig Junior, last year.Where MXit has excelled in the pre-smartphone market has been in connecting to other services like Yahoo, ICQ, Google Talk and Facebook while operating on the relatively cheap GPRS packet oriented mobile data service.Prior to BlackBerry and its infamous BBM free instant messaging service, ...

• 5 Factors that could be very dangerous to a post-IPO Facebook

  As part of the preparations for its looming IPO, Facebook has to disclose in its SEC filing some risk factors which could materially and adversely affect the company. These kinds of disclosures make for interesting reading, especially so because the destinies of tech companies can turn on a dime and change rapidly from day to day -- just look at what happened to MySpace and Yahoo!.Let’s take a closer look at some of these issues that Facebook, itself, has ...

• Online censorship is the new black

  Online censorship, it would seem, is no longer the preserve of governments bandying around acronyms like SOPA, PIPA, and ACTA. Google and Twitter both recently announced censorship measures that are going to be put in place on Blogger and Twitter respectively and one isn’t wrong in thinking that the days of the internet being an open and free place to find and share information are over.Twitter’s censorship of its tweets is in accordance with the laws of the countries in ...

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