Twitter has gone all traditional media on us. The social networking giant recently aired its first ever TV ads. The first ad aired during the 2012 Pocono 400 Nascar race and featured driver Brad Keselowski, sharing his view of the world from his phone. The series of adverts is meant to promote Twitter's new promoted hashtags. More particularly, they pointed to http://twitter.com/#nascar which immediately redirects to http://twitter.com/hashtag/nascar. The new page shows a series of tweets and people related to ...

This is beyond cool. It's a new form of webcam to animated avatar technology, courtesy of Yasue Mitsukura and the good people at Keio University in Japan. The system uses an ordinary webcam to track minute changes in the user's face, which are then mirrored in detail by an animated avatar. According to Mitsukura (via Diginfo) the system is actually superior to kind of motion capture technology used by big film and gaming projects. Systems using motion capture with markers on ...

For more than 15 years the Webby Awards, known as “the Oscars of the Internet”, have rewarded innovation online. Famous for their five-word acceptance speeches, the awards have honoured innovators like World Wide Web inventor Sir Tim Berners Lee and Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington, and top online players such as Facebook, Wikipedia, and Pinterest. Memeburn caught up with the founder and former creative CEO of the Webbys Tiffany Shlain, who was honoured by Newsweek as one of the ...

A lot has been happening over at Facebook in the last few months. Yes yes, we all know about their (un)successful IPO and how much fun it is to watch their share price dip and soar. But really, there are some other things happening over at the big blue social network. Zuck got married, it rolled out promoted posts, Facebook overtook Google as the most popular website in the world... wait, what? Yes, Facebook and Google alternated between first and ...

I have done extensive research, performing interviews with countless mobile users (well, four actually, but who's counting) to get to the bottom of which phones are at the top of the pile. This is what I discovered… Why we're better than everyone else -- iPhone users It is ridiculous that we should even be asked why our phones are superior to yours, dirty commoner. What an insult! Was the patron saint Steve Jobs not martyred so that we could enjoy superior ...

“Why am I still being defined by my fridge?” Dion Chang, a designer turned corporate analyst, asks the audience at the Flux Trends Review -- a one-day trend conference. He’s talking about LSMs, but it’s an unexpectedly apt description given the Icelandic conditions inside the auditorium (I half expected Bjork to appear on the beautifully decorated stage). LSMs (Living Standards Measures) have been used to categorise people since the 1980s, and they’ve become outdated. As it turns out, the gadgets ...

Before a few months ago, search engine optimisation seemed rather cut and dry. Google, for the most part, used a combination of factors to determine where a website should rank. One such factor was links. Each link to a website carried a value and this value added value to the website being linked to. One might say that the more links to a website, the higher the website would rank. For the most part this was accurate, assuming that the ...

Motribe is best known for building mobile social networks, but the company is seems to be getting into another niche: building photo-based apps for Mxit. The South African-based company recently launched JudgeMe, an app that helps people meet each other by uploading and browsing photos. Today meanwhile saw it officially announce the launch MxPix -- an app that makes photo sharing and filtering possible for people with feature phones. JudgeMe was well received, gaining over 400 000 users less than ...

When Rocket Internet launched its Nigerian Amazon clone, it was always just going to be a matter of time before it launched another site in the country. The German-based startup incubator's latest ecommerce property is called Sabunta -- a shoe and fashion site that runs along the same model as Zando in South Africa, Zalando in Germany and the UK, Locondo in Japan, The Iconic in Australia, and Zalora in Singapore. Perhaps conscious of the fact that a large portion ...

Facebook's App Centre has officially gone live, with around 600 apps available on the web as well through its iOS and Android apps. In an official blog post, the social network revealed more details about the app centre, after announcing it a few weeks back. First off, Facebook seems to be punting personalisation, saying that the centre "lets you browse the apps your friends use". It also claims that it "only lists high-quality apps, based on feedback from people ...