The BlackBerry faithful and converts alike gathered in Florida today to watch BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins deliver his first keynote since the BlackBerry 10 launch back in January this year.So how has the troubled smartphone maker fared since its rebirth? "Some said last year's conference would be the last for BlackBerry. They said it would by my first and last time on stage. I'm happy to say they were wrong," said Heins. "This year feels very, very different. It's ...

This is interesting. Outlook.com users will now be able to chat with their Google friends from within the webmail service.Since launching its revamped email service in mid-2012, Microsoft has done a number of things to try to get people to make the switch from Gmail. These include baking Skype-functionality into it, the ability to chat with your Facebook friends and an Android app (talk about going into the heart of the enemy's territory).When you open the Messaging pane ...

It's time to face facts. Samsung isn't going to be usurped from its position on top of the smartphone pile any time soon.In fact, the latest figures from tech research company Gartner suggest that Samsung is still on the rise and that its rival-in-chief Apple has actually lost market share. That, it seems, is largely down to Android gaining further ground, such that three-quarters of all smartphones shipped around the world run the Google-made OS.As the ...

Social is inherently not made for business at all. The business to consumer, or brands interacting with consumers on social in general, is a tough nut to crack. This begs the question - how do we approach business-to-business communication using social media?There are a few challenges:Which top platforms are small businesses and owners using on social? How do business engage with other business over these platforms? What should we measure against?I’m going to touch on each of these below.Before we ...

A recent Reddit post of Miss Korea contestants titled “Korea’s plastic surgery mayhem is finally converging on the same face” led to a gif that has been meming its way around the net and provoking some heated discussion:(These are actually Miss Daegu contestants, not Miss Korea finalists as netizens claimed – I will spare you my rant on the need for fact-checking in social media.)After the pics went viral, Korean beauty practices yet again fell under the digital spotlight. Many ...

People are spoiled for choice when it comes to email marketing services. For example, internationally there is MailChimp, iContact, Benchmark and Campaign Monitor, while Everlytic, and Graphic Mail have made their marks on the South African market. Dashing into the fray comes Total Send, an email marketing service from Cape Town. It's pièce de résistance? Aggressive pricing.Total Send's founder Luke Wingfield Digby believes that the pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and search engine optimisation (SEO) scenes have become too crowded and expensive. ...

Sleek, shiny and utterly sexy. This is the first impression you get of the Acer Aspire S7 Ultrabook. It positions itself in the same sort of market as the Macbook Air, with its lack of any kind of optical drive, its light body, and its smooth aluminium exterior, but is this US$1 200 Windows 8 machine a serious competitor, or is it overpriced for the features it offers?To begin, let's get down to the basics of this machine. The Acer Aspire ...

What would Google be without hidden easter eggs and random doodles commemorating random birthdays of famous people and inventions? Not as awesome, that's what. Yep, the search engine has yet another easter egg (hidden, entertaining features developers build into a website or program) tucked away into a G-product -- this time it's an adaptation of Atari Breakout.The classic arcade game was introduced in 1976, an evolution of Atari's previous game Pong, and involves smashing through rows of coloured bricks with ...

A new age of reciprocity is here as Shared Economy is starting to make its imprints. Research from popular French tech conference LeWeb shows that those who have participated in this new trend “have double downed in this market.” Beyond the macro-trends of sustainability, increased population, and access to the internet, the research found that the startups are strengthened with VC funding.For those who don’t know, shared economy is the trend that cloaks up all platforms and ventures that ...

This is interesting. It turns out that something as simple as whether or not your tweet has an exclamation mark in it can determine how many retweets it gets.At least that's according to research conducted by social media scientist Dan Zarella. The research, he says, was conducted in response to a tweeted question from search guru Rand Fishkin and looks at the relationship between exclamation points in tweets and retweets and clicks.Zarella used a dataset of more than two-million ...