Analysis of the pornography industry provides fascinating insight into how consumer ideology shapes online behavior. When we look at the industry in terms of emerging markets we get to catch a glimpse of new forms of media consumption as they blossom. In emerging markets like Brazil, South Africa and India, the industry is thriving and will follow international mobile trends when it comes to adult entertainment consumption. It's big business, in fact it's the number one commercial industry online. In spite ...

I recently came across an interesting blog post which states that the Pirate Bay (by the way, if you support the kind of thinking behind SOPA you shouldn't click on that link, it takes you to a site that encourages copyright infringement) has created a new download category -- 'Physibles'. According to the Pirate Bay, physibles are digital objects that can be converted into tangible physical objects. Huh? It took me a few seconds to work out what the hell ...

New research suggests that Twitter’s growth in Africa is being driven primarily young people using mobile devices and that South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, and Egypt are the continent’s leading tweeters. The research is a collaboration between Portland Communications, a strategic communications consultancy and specialist media platform Tweetminster. The two claim to have "analysed over 11.5-million geo-located Tweets originating on the continent during the last three months of 2011”. The analysis, they say, was "complemented by a survey of 500 of ...

Online shopping was a pain before I got my first credit card. Painstakingly transferring money from my bank account to an online vendor is not ideal. With a credit card though, online shopping becomes easy. For the unlucky few who cannot get a credit card, online shopping dreams are dashed. Not so, says Triloq Payment Services. Its products, 1-2-Pay Online  and AcceptEmail have been in development from January 2011 and aim to “free” the user from online shopping payment grief, allowing ...

Within the confines of the audiophile spectrum exists a passel of audio listeners with varying degrees of auditory discernment. Somewhere an insomniac just likes to hear the voice of the 3AM DJ on a kitchen radio, in the apartment below some hipsters are having existential debates about 1Q84 while streaming Bon Iver’s latest over a Bluetooth speaker, while further down the street a bass woofer with a car passes a bunch of guys busting moves to the beat of Run ...

Rovio’s hit franchise Angry Birds is set to smash beak first into Facebook come Valentine’s Day. According to Asia Tech News, the company is planning a massive launch in Jakarta, Indonesia. According to Rovio head Peter Veserbacka, the decision to launch in Jakarta is a fairly obvious one, given that it is the "global capital of Facebook". The country does, after all, have the second largest Facebook population, after the US. Angry Birds is already available across a number ...

Symantec has released a "hotfix" for customers affected by an Anonymous hack that targeted its pcAnywhere software. The fix comes after the security company released a statement confirming that the Anonymous hacktivist group had gained access to its source code, which was a "result of a theft of source code that occurred in 2006". The source code theft affected PCAnyWhere -- a tool that allows customers to remotely connect to other computers --, as well as Norton Antivirus Corporate Edition, ...

Facebook has reportedly halted trading in secondary markets, possibly indicating that the world’s largest social network may finally be ready for its long-awaited IPO. According to Bloomberg, representatives from Facebook’s law firm, Fenwick & West, sent a letter to one of the markets explaining the decision. The decision to halt trading on secondary markets is not necessarily an indication that Facebook is on the verge of going public. An analyst speaking to Bloomberg, feels that this may, however, be the ...

Twitter has added languages written from right-to-left to its Twitter Translation Centre. The languages available for volunteers to translate are Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew and Urdu. At least three of these languages are spoken across the Middle East, where Twitter was frequently used as a means of spreading the message of the so-called Arab Spring revolutions. Against the background of these revolutions, which saw the overthrow of decades-old dictatorial regimes, Arabic was one of the fastest growing languages on Twitter. This despite ...

Jack Welch once said, "Change before you have to". Few other companies today have applied this wisdom with more consistency than Facebook. For better or worse, Facebook has always believed in pushing the envelope when it comes to making to changes to the platform. It is this willingness to constantly challenge both themselves and their users that some have credited with Facebook's eventual dominance of the social media space. To be sure, some changes have certainly been more popular than ...