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

It's estimated that WordPress, Joomla and Drupal combined, constitute roughly 70% of the CMS market. Probably for good reason too. All three are highly customisable, extensible and have massive loyal -- some say cult-like -- user communities. CNN and Time run on Wordpress. Joomla boasts big clients such as eBay, Barnes & Noble, Ikea and Pizza Hut. Ever heard of a little site called The Economist? How about The White House? Drupal have those covered. Clearly, if you're cool you wouldn't be caught dead using one of these mainstream CMSes to bootstrap your project. Or maybe you would? Because hating...

There are a load of businesses and people out there still grappling with terms like "social media marketing". But that's just the tip of the iceberg. The truth is that there are a lot of organisations out there that still don't know how how to sell themselves to other businesses. In my mind there is a drastic shift that is needed. And the social media revolution (yes, I said revolution) has spurred on this need for evolution in business to business (B2B) thinkers. The major problem is highlighted in the term “B2B” itself. There should be no such term in...

When it comes to selling yourself or your brand, the real task is to spread ideas. Simply put, we want to spread the idea that our brand is amazing, or that you would be crazy not to come to our show or who would vote for anyone other than our party? Yes I know there’s also other stuff, like product development and research and innovation, but in the end it’s the idea of what that product is, what feelings it evokes and how that idea spreads that will determine whether it will be successful or not. I have had to speak...

Everybody's favourite whistle-blowing organisation has branched out into social. WikiLeaks has just launched Friends of WikiLeaks (FoWL), an encrypted network, which it says is aimed at supporting anyone aligned with its goals and philosophies. According to the site's welcome page, FoWL: is a network of people from across the globe who defend WikiLeaks, its people, its alleged sources and its mission. We publicly and privately promote WikiLeaks and individuals and organisations aligned with the mission of WikiLeaks. This site will help you to join with people like you in your area and across the world. You will make new...

Mark Zuckerberg is now a married man. The Facebook founder and CEO wed his long-time girlfriend Priscilla Chan in a backyard ceremony in Palo Alto yesterday. The couple have been together for nearly eight years after meeting at Harvard, where Zuckerberg first put what would become Facebook in motion. The ceremony took place in front of 100 people in the back garden of the house the two share together. Zuckerberg and Chan had reportedly been planning the wedding in secret for five months, with guests under the impression that they were there to celebrate Chan's graduation from medical school....

I don’t get all the fanfare about Google’s recent “Knowledge Graph” launch -- surely it’s just another step on Google’s path of evolving search? First, we had Google’s attempt to show us more than just links with Universal Search in 2007 – that started incorporating aspects like images and news. Secondarily, and totally coincidentally, we had Google Squared which was viewed as more of a computational engine that extracted data from webpages and presented them in search results in a spreadsheet -- a Wolfram Alpha Lite, if you will. Squared was “retired” as a standalone site last year but...

So it’s official. The starting figure for Facebook shares today is… US$38. It’s higher than expected (although not by much) and if many have their way it’s just the beginning. Not unsurprisingly there have been naysayers as you’d expect (perhaps more that you’d expect) but when you have a +US$100-billion IPO (the last one was Visa) mixed with additional recent large investment rounds and economic uncertainty seemingly looming around every corner, people invariably become polarised. So what happens when the bell closes today? Well for you and me, likely not a lot. The site won’t change, it’ll...

Ah man, anyone who thought Facebook was just a fad must be eating their words right now. Facebook’s IPO, however flat its opening may have turned out to be, is something that’s turning the world on its head. One of the biggest impacts of Facebook going public is that it is now in an elite class of its own. Not that it wasn’t already, but now it’s official. It’s not going anywhere, anytime soon, contrary to the disputes from anti-Facebookers cries of “It’s just a fad, like Myspace”. Facebook has now joined a business category that can qualify for...

Comic-meme creation and consumption has taken internet culture by storm and seems to be only increasing in frequency and engagement. Memes come in all types but in this case ‘LOL cats’ and ‘Rage comics’ are being produced at a rate never seen before. Ben Huh wants to turn this mechanic into news delivery. In a recent interview the man behind I can haz cheezburger spoke of how he sees ‘meme-mechanics’ as the future of news content distribution. His argument centers on how subjectivity is king when it comes to content on the internet and a cultural shift is taking place,...

Google's Knowledge Graph is generating a lot of hype. For good reason too, it’s a big leap forward in the early stages of the semantic web. A semantic web has context and not just content. This means that when you search for the Taj Mahal, as an example, you get results on the Taj Mahal that you were actually looking for. So if you were looking for the iconic building, that’s what you will find. If you were looking for the band that’s what you will find, and so on. But how does Google do this? Well in short, Google...