Sweden’s Twitter account, @Sweden, has been taken over by ordinary citizens to make it “the world’s most democratic Twitter account”. Each week will see one individual Tweeting about whatever he/she likes. The citizens to whom the account have been handed to, are chosen if they "represent values, skills, ideas and are passionate about a number of areas" Jack Werner, the first citizen to take over @Sweden started tweeting on 10 December. On his profile he writes: “After finishing school with ...

Brands make a lot of noise about entering the social media foray and communicating with their communities online. But what happens when this goes wrong? What happens when the community bites back and starts to either attack the brand, or simply disagree with what the brand is saying? A Process is needed! Jeremiah Owyang, a renowned web strategist and partner at the Altimeter Group of San Meto, California in the United States, a group that prides itself on being a research-advisory firm ...

For the last eight years, I have seen articles proclaiming that Linux is almost ready for the Desktop. In fact, on sites like Slashdot, comments along those lines tend to get modded as 'Funny'. But the tide seems to be turning. AMD is reportedly backing an open-source project that is looking to port the Android operating system onto PCs powered by x86-based processors. If this sort of initiative gains momentum, will it finally see Linux make it to the mainstream ...

Google has released its 2011 Zeitgeist, a look back at what was popular in search over the past year. This Zeitgeist marks Google's 11th release, fitting. "This year marks our 11th annual look back at the searches that compose the year’s Zeitgeist—the spirit of the time. With Zeitgeist, we look at the most popular and the fastest rising terms—the terms with the highest growth in 2011—in many categories across many countries around the world," writes Google Fellow, Amit Singhal. This year's ...

India will have an estimated 1.36-billion mobile subscribers by 2020, up from 812-million connections in 2011. That’s according to research from Analysys Mason, a company that claims to provide “market intelligence worldwide to leading commercial and public-sector organisations in telecoms, IT, and media”. The company reckons, however, that just over half these subscriptions will belong to unique users. A combination of factors, all related to what Analysys Mason calls “affordability constraints in rural areas”, mean that unique subscriptions will only ...

Jimmy Kimmel has yet again managed to convince American parents to prank their kids, this time with bad Christmas presents. Just a few months ago he asked parents to hide their kids' Halloween candy and upload a video of their reaction to YouTube. This time parents were asked to allow their children to open one "bad" present two weeks before Christmas. The parents then had to, as before, upload a video of their children's reaction to YouTube with the title ...

I recently attended the annual media party at the Googleplex. A few of years ago I reported that Google was deliberately avoiding hiring journalists or experienced PR people and recruiting straight from universities for its corporate communications teams. That policy has changed as shown by the hiring of the very impressive Maggie Shiels, a veteran reporter for the BBC. The annual media party has changed a lot from the early days, I've been attending it for nearly a decade. Larry and ...

Being a gadget site we’re not looking at core hardware innovations that shake the world, we’re looking at the awesome innovations that knocked our socks off – or will soon. 2011 was largely a year of incremental improvements – but often the impact of radical innovations don’t become apparent for a few years. Accurate, reliable capacitive touch-screens, for example. So we’re reaching a bit, but these are the innovations we think you’ll look back on in a year and say, ...

Naspers, an emerging markets internet multinational based in South Africa, is abandoning its local classifieds service for the internationally-renowned OLX, the world's largest free classified site with over 130 million unique visitors per month. The move is mainly one of consolidation because Naspers took a stake in OLX in August 2010. OLX is used in more than 90 countries and 40 languages. The company was co-founded in March 2006 by millionaire internet entrepreneurs Fabrice Grinda and Alec Oxenford. OLX has more ...

The battery vampire plaguing certain iPhone 4S users will be staked by iOS5.1, the version just released to Apple developers as a beta. iOS 5.1 will run on iPhone 3GS, 4, 4S, the iPads and the most recent iPod Touches. Known as “Batterygate”, iPhone 4S users complained about the intense levels of power drain which their phones experienced. Fingers were pointed at Siri, the personal voice assistant for the iPhone 4S, as well as the inability for the A5 CPU and ...