Weekly Round Up Podcast #79: Blackberry, Motorola, Ventureburn’s Pitching Den & Twitter

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...

Mobile finance is massive. In fact, mobile payments alone are set to be worth US1.3-trillion by 2017. In emerging markets, mobile financial services have been disrupting the banking norm for years now. Developed markets have pretty much caught up now, and the field's about to explode. Thing is, there are still a lot of misconceptions about mobile finance and, according to Gartner research vice president Alistair Newton, they desperately need to be corrected. Newton reckons there are seven myths that particularly need to be addressed. 1. Mobile money is fine the way it is The mobile money...

So Apple won its patent claims against Samsung in the United States, big surprise there. Those of us really invested in the patent war between Samsung and Apple have sat in our various circles debating the decision and tweeting our approval or disapproval of the jury's decision. But I am not done. Some background The case focused around Apple’s claim that Samsung "slavishly" copied its mobile products (specifically the iPhone and iPad). Samsung countered with a defence that it didn't. The US jury mostly agreed with Apple, ruling that several of Samsung’s devices had infringed on Apple's software and...

Many people will accumulate vast digital libraries in their lifetimes. The ease of buying titles from Amazon, iBooks and iTunes has meant more people are beginning to consume media digitally than ever before. Last month Amazon.com announced that it now officially sells more books via it’s Kindle than print books in the UK. As the popularity for digital books grow, the trend is sure to follow in other areas. But who exactly owns your digital assets when you die? And can you leave them for your decedents? In the "good old days" you could leave your library or LP collection to your...

Apple and Google have the potential to disrupt the status quo of the tech industry says Gartner analyst Jeffery Mann. Google Business and Apple's entry into enterprise are paving the way for these two tech giants to seriously shake things up for the likes Microsoft, Cisco, HP, Oracle, IBM and SAP. The way Mann sees it, Microsoft wants to replicate its technology platform and ecosystem success in the "emerging battle for cloud-based platforms and services with its Windows Azure infrastructure platform and Azure Services Platform". The way the company is hoping to achieve this is through a set of...

I've always advised people not to worry about search engine optimization (SEO) with the explanation that it's the job of the search engine to optimize its performance -- not yours. Over on SEOBook, there's a great article pointing out how Google is now measuring any attempt at raising the rank of a web page as the work of a spammer -- no matter the quality of the content -- and it will penalize the site. Any attempt to modify the rank of a web page, after it's been ranked, could spell disaster for the site owner. A little known Google patent called...

Facebook and international news outfit CNN have unveiled Facebook-CNN Election Insights, following their partnership earlier this month to bring a “uniquely social experience” to this year's US elections. A tool that displays the real-time number of people talking about the candidates for the election. Facebook-CNN Election Insights displays dynamic, real-time charts and visualisations using Facebook Insights to gauge the volume of Facebook activity surrounding the election and candidates. The news network will use the tool, which also allows people to view data by geography and demography, during their coverage of the presidential election. Through social integration platform Mass Relevance, Facebook...