Advertisers and marketers are always looking for new and innovative ways to market their brands. While traditional advertising is beginning to take a back seat to the social media craze, there is another medium that hovers between being seen as an advertising platform and a social platform. But are marketers really getting the most out of a platform like YouTube?Humble Beginnings In December of 2005 YouTube officially came out of beta testing and was introduced to the world, with a then ...

There has been a lot of discussion lately about US jobs and Silicon Valley's role in helping to rebuild the US workforce. US government officials and many others believe that Silicon Valley is key to reviving US jobs growth. But is this really true?It's worth revisiting an article in Bloomberg Businessweek from last year, written by Andy Grove, a veteran Silicon Valley executive who helped build one of its most successful companies: Intel.Andy Grove worked with the early founders ...

In the week since Google took its brand new social network, Google+, public the network has seen a record number of signups.A recent post by Paul Allen, Ancestry.com co-founder and unofficial Google+ statistician, revealed that Google+ has reached an estimated 43.4-million users and counting. According to Allen, roughly a third of the users were added in the few days after Google+ opened itself to the public.Allen's Google+ numbers first gained credibility in early July, when he estimated the service had ...

Upcycling, resource re-allocation and a bit of animated fun is where it’s at in design at the moment. We look at the possibility of a biofuel that uses recycled newspapers, a raincoat that gathers and stores the water, and typewriters that get a second chance.Biofuel from newspapersScientists at Tulane University in New Orleans have found a novel bacterial strain, dubbed “TU-103”, that can use (news)paper to produce butanol, a biofuel that works as a gasoline substitute. TU-103 is the ...

Blogging platform, Tumblr, has raised US$85-million worth of funding reports the New York Times.The fresh round of funding is led by venture capitalist firms Greylock Partners and Insight Venture Partners and includes cash injections from Peter Chernin's investment business and English billionaire Sir Richard Branson.Tumblr was founded in 2007 by David Karp and now has more than 29.9-million registered blogs. Karp said in a news release that the new funding would allow the blogging company "to continue to scale ...

No industry of any value in the United States is without a lobbying arm, and with an estimated worth of US$100-billion for Facebook, social networking is definitely a valuable industry. It is unsurprising, therefore, that Facebook filed paperwork to form a political action committee(PAC) this week.This news was first confirmed by The Hill, a Washington DC newspaper focusing on US congressional politics. According to the Hill, reports that Facebook was considering in forming the PAC first surfaced after domain names ...

A South African music journalist is suing a freelance music director linked to popular South African rock act, the Parlotones. The suit comes after the director threatened to physically harm the journalist on Facebook following a negative review.According to the Cape Argus, the threat came after the journalist, Diane Coetzer wrote a review of the Parlotones big-budget stage show, "Dragonflies and Astronauts" for the Daily Maverick. The article, subtitled “Lousy theatre, great music”, criticised a number of aspects of ...

The Chinese government has issued an order to its police force: “Start using social media.”“Ensuring social openness and dispelling misunderstandings” is the goal of the Chinese state government according to the Xinhua news agency. At a conference earlier this week, Huang Ming, vice-minister of public security said that the aim was to assist law enforcement officials in using microblogs or weibos. Weibos can be compared to Twitter and include websites such as Sina which has some 200-million users.Haung said, ...

Very little can get netizens around the world up and ready to riot like the discovery that Facebook has (yet again) changed its interface, and with the latest updates on the world's largest social network, the reaction has been no different.As Memeburn reported, The hashtag "#newfacebook" was where much invective and anger on Twitter was hurled at Facebook and its founder Mark Zuckerberg as the revamped news-feed was rolled out. With even further changes in the pipeline the world's largest ...

Amazon is expected to unveil an Android powered tablet which may or may not go by the name of the “Kindle Fire” this week. According to reports, the Kindle Fire will be a 7” tablet which will look very similar to the Blackberry Playbook.The report continues by saying that the Kindle Fire will ship in the second week of November.Analysts predict that the Kindle Fire could become a rival to the iPad 2 and ensure that another competitor is ...