SpaceX reveals interplanetary rocket, spaceship

As usual, around Loeries time, the assaults have begun in the media, social and otherwise. As a past subscriber to the criticisms leveled at South Africa's pre-eminent advertising awards, and now a committee member of them, I feel that I need to break my silence and say a few things in their support. Take that as a disclosure if you must. I sit on the Loeries Committee, which is to say, I volunteer my time as a representative of the Digital Media and Marketing Association to assist in the formulation and execution of these annual awards. The Loeries themselves are...

Everywhere you look, big tech players are looking to get into the financial services game. But that doesn't mean Apple, Google, Facebook will replace your bank any time soon. Not by a long way. Certainly digital has lowered barriers to entry into the financial services space, but it hasn't killed banking and it won't for some time to come. According to Gartner research vice president Alistair Newton, saying that Google is the bank of the future is like trying fit a square peg into a round hole. That's not to say that they don't have a...

US president Barack Obama took to Reddit yesterday evening for an hour-long session of the “Ask Me Anything” series. In the process, he became the first sitting head-of-state to do so and added a huge dose of credibility to the social news website. The site was inundated with visitors and the surge in traffic made sure that the session wasn't as productive as the president would have liked, but part of the strategy was surely to divert a whole lot of media time from the Republican presidential campaign that was happening at the same time. Obama and his team...

Ever wished you could tweet for money? Well now you can. And you don't have to become a social media manager either. A new product from advertising network company Ad Dynamo allows ordinary people to monetise their tweets. The service today announced the launch of its Sponsored Tweets service, which enables Twitter users from around the world to get paid for sending tweets that promote advertisers' products and services. In order to take part in the service, people have to respond to briefs prepared by advertisers. People who are influential within their social circle, particularly if they have a large...

So you might notice something a little different about your Twitter stream from here on out. Well, if you pay attention to the promoted tweets and accounts that is. The social network announced that from now on its two biggest advertising streams would be tailored according to your interests. While the service has been available to a select beta group for a while, it's now open to all advertisers. It says that by targeting people’s topical interests, advertisers "will be able to connect with a greater number of users and deliver tailored messages to people who are more likely...

The Harvard Business Review is one of the most respected and watched academic journals in the world. So when it publishes a piece with the simple title “Marketing is dead”, then the world of PR, marketing and advertising is going to sit up and take note. The story, written by author and consultant Bill Lee, begins by asserting the various ways in which traditional marketing has fallen apart before going on to explain what actually is working in the 21st Century. Lee attacks traditional marketing on three fronts: He believes that ‘buyers are no longer paying attention’ -- that...

Despite a cat’s cradle of challenges around digital rights and payments, not to mention the constant threat of piracy, digital music is seen as a large opportunity for African musicians and mobile industry players, according to speakers at the Mobile Entertainment Africa 2012 conference held in Cape Town this week. General sentiment is that making digital music more available will go a long way to thwarting piracy. According to Yoel Kenan, founder and CEO of AFRICORI, a digital music company specialising in emerging markets, up to 90% of music consumed online is not strictly legal, thanks both to piracy and...

The next couple of weeks are going to be incredibly busy in the mobile world. Nearly all the big players are set to announce new products, culminating in the launch of the iPhone 5. More than just providing cool tech though, these launches will influence what direction mobile heads in leading up to 2017. While we can't be entirely certain what's going to happen over the next five years, we can make some reasonable guesses says Leif-Olof Wallin, a research vice president at tech analysis company Gartner. Smartphones will keep winning While the global mobile market as a whole...

My recent post about Google's battle with spammers seems to have confused some people in the Search Engine Optimization industry. There's a perception that I'm advising web sites not to improve the quality of their content. I'm not advising anything, I'm reporting that a little known Google patent appears to be playing a major role in how a post-Panda Google now ranks web sites and web pages. It also explains some of the bizarre, random changes in rankings that have bedeviled SEO efforts by webmasters. If Google detects that a web page has been changed between visits from its spider, it...

Do you need help engaging with your customers on Twitter, making sense of what users are saying and understanding your followers so you can make sure you actually share content they'll find valuable? Well, you're in luck. Twitter has just made your life easier... or, at least helped some businesses building tools for the platform get a stamp of approval and extra attention. In an official blog post, Twitter's business development manager Doug Williams announced the company's new certified products program, which is designed to make it easier for brands to identify third party services that can help them...