One of the most frequent questions clients ask me is: "How am I doing compared to my competition?" Owing to the fact that many clients don't understand the intricacies of AdWords, the smart (and totally not facetious) answer is usually: "How long is a piece of string?"The beauty of AdWords lies in the kinds of keywords you're bidding on, how much you're bidding, what match types you're using to capture those words, what negative keywords you're using, what kind ...

Video Review: The US$500 XZ-1 looks serious. Little adornment, and a clever selection of materials and textures means it looks like a sturdy metal bomb-proof camera of yore (i.e. about 1980), even though most of the body is a rugged plastic. So it’s tough, but not too heavy -- and sports a big light-gobbling Zuiko lens. Roger Hislop reviews Olympus’ return to the enthusiast compact camera market.For more, see Gearburn.com

Even though I've been connected to Xbox Live and the PSN network for a while now, there is one aspect of those services which I’ve never got around to taking advantage of: Downloadable games.Both the Xbox 360 and the PSN have marketplaces that offer a number of games which are only available through them. Downloadable games tend to be smaller in terms of spectacle and "ooh-aaah" visuals, but many of them pack it in where it's most needed: gameplay. The ...

Twitter, Facebook and BlackBerry have responded to suggestions by British Prime Minister David Cameron that police and intelligence services should be empowered to shut their services down in times of national emergency.Speaking before an emergency sitting of parliament, the first since violent riots broke out across English cities, David Cameron announced a decision to explore ways in which perhaps social networking services might be shut down."… when people are using social media for violence we need to stop ...

Earlier this week Facebook launched a mobile messaging app for iPhone and Android, creating some buzz and lots of angry buzzing. It's not a dramatic move, but almost certainly a very important move for Facebook as it looks to become even more entrenched in our daily lives – and make ever more connections between Facebook members and their real-life identities.The app does roughly what the messaging feature in the existing Facebook app does -- except that it takes a few ...

Taiwanese smartphone giant HTC plans to pay about US$309 million for a 51 percent stake in Beats Electronics, the celebrity-centric marketing operation for higher-end headphones, fronted by hip hop artist and producer Dr Dre.According to HTC, the company is working with Beats Electronics LLC to create a line of HTC headsets offering "high performance sound" to be available this fall, a company statement said. Manufacturing for Beat’s headphones is done by Monster with lines including Beats by Dr Dre and ...

Google has added games, including the wildly popular Angry Birds, to its exploding social network Google+."We want to make playing games online just as fun, and just as meaningful, as playing in real life", Google senior vice president of engineering Vic Gundotra said in an official blog post. He went on to say that the new feature was gradually being rolled out on the new social network."When you're ready to play, the Games page is waiting."Along with global game sensation ...

Group buying. Daily deals. Social commerce. Call it what you will, but the sheer number of blatant knock-offs that have sprung up in global markets following the "success" of Groupon and LivingSocial should give you a hint that all is not well.A fair number of these startups are nothing more than two or three people, a few laptops, an internet connection and phone line. They're strangely reminiscent of those outfits that sold small businesses those five-page microsites a decade ago. ...

Marketing and media companies are always looking for innovative ways to gauge consumer behaviour and activity online. It affects how accurately they're able to market their products according to age, gender, cultural demographics, and geography. There's a fine line, however, between savvy market research and bypassing the principles of consumer privacy.Many technology companies make it their mission to develop new technologies that practically deauthorise user choice about what is tracked and, even more subversively, how it's tracked.A recent ...

Turmoil in global financial markets and economies is never good for Silicon Valley despite the fact that the regional economy has its own boom and bust cycles that operate on a different timetable.Currently, Silicon Valley has been booming, recapturing the trend that was in place in the second half of 2008, before the financial meltdown, of growing VC investments and jobs. It has to be asked though, whether like that recovery in 2008 which ran smack into an economic crisis, ...