YouTube suffers global outage causing mass internet panic

Marketing via mobile is a powerful way to expose people to a brand, and to get them to interact with it. Consumers want something from the sites they frequent on their mobile phones, while brands want to achieve something from their mobile marketing. You hit the marketing sweetspot when you manage to match these two sets of desires. What do consumers want from their mobile phones? • Social networking • Email and instant messaging • Music • Games • Content • News and information • Simple and secure payments What do brands want from mobile? • Ability to build a loyal profiled user base • Communication with a large, diverse base • Customer retention and repeat usage ...

They hide under the bridges of online anonymity, ready to pounce on unsuspecting forums, chat rooms, news sites and blogs. They can ruin a lively debate with one well-placed comment. They do not care about contributing. Often they don’t even believe what they type. Their only desire is to provoke you – they are the internet trolls. What is a troll? The term originated from “trolling”, a method of fishing where bait or a lure is dragged behind a boat. This was reappropriated into the online world as "trolling for newbies", where experienced chat room users would "catch" and reveal...

Google rolled out a new feature called "Place Search" on Wednesday to make it easier for users to find information about local businesses. Place Search eliminates the need to perform several internet searches by grouping multiple results about a specific location into one entry. A search result for a particular type of restaurant, for example, may list several relevant local eateries and provide an address, a map, a photo, links to reviews from sites such as Yelp.com and other relevant information. "It makes it easier to find a comprehensive view of each place," Google product manager Jackie Bavaro said in a blog...

Finally, one of the big corporates has stood up and staked its claim to the iceberg that was spotted off Clifton Beach on Monday morning. Speculation has been rife about who was responsible, and now fruit juice giant Liqui-fruit has digitally added pieces of fruit to the iceberg, then added some lines of text which read "The end of global cooling....the start of the Liqui-Fruit summer meltdown.", giving the video a slicker, more commercial treatment and promoting the Summer Meltdown on its Facebook page. But is it really their campaign, or is Liqui-Fruit being opportunistic and hopping on the bandwagon? Check...

South Africa's premier domestic rugby competition, the Currie Cup, comes to a gripping climax this Saturday afternoon with the final between the Sharks and Western Province in Durban. But even though the game is still days away, the battle is already heating up on micro-blogging platform Twitter. Supporters of both teams are being encouraged to follow their teams on Twitter before the big final in a bid to establish cyber-dominance and gain a psychological edge. Sharks supporters are following just_sharks, while Province supporters are signing up at JustWP. By Wednesday morning the Sharks had just over 3 100 followers, while...

Politicians around the world have woken up to the potential of Facebook and Twitter as unfiltered platforms from which they can deliver their message to a receptive audience. But few have taken it up as effectively and with the same gusto as Nigeria's wonderfully-named President, Goodluck Jonathan. During the 1930's, the US President Roosevelt delivered a weekly radio broadcast to the nation, which consisted of reassuring the nation that it was going to recover and sharing his hopes and plans for the country during the Great Depression. These "fireside chats" were enormously popular and had a profound effect on...

Doesn't it seem that the Facebook Like buttons populating the web have been there forever? In fact they were only introduced in June 2010, and are already being used on over 350 000 websites, according to the Wall Street Journal. Essentially, the Like button is a tool that allows users to show appreciation for what they are viewing without having to say a word. All that is required is a simple click that lets your network know that you have given your stamp of approval. And this implementation of Facebook's Social Graph is subtly changing the model of how...

Google, which has strained relations with publishers worldwide who accuse it of aggregating articles without compensation, says it is to donate $5-million (about R35-million) to encourage innovation in digital journalism. But the donation, a paltry sum in the face of significant losses by traditional publishers worldwide, is unlikely to mollify media owners who accuse Google of spidering content without sufficient compensation and threatening their advertising models via the disruptive (but extremely innovative) Adwords and Adsense programmes. "Journalism is fundamental to a functioning democracy," writes president of Google's global sales operations and business development Nikesh Arora on the official Google blog. "So as...

Ask web entrepreneur Stefan Magdalinski why he moved from London to Cape Town two years ago, and he points to a map that illustrates the technological revolution reshaping Africa. The map shows the 14 undersea fibre-optic cables that will link the continent's internet service providers to the servers of Europe and Asia by mid-2012, increasing the capacity of its cable internet connections almost three-fold from today and nearly 300-fold from 2009. The cables are drawn in different colours and in thicknesses that represent their capacity -- from the thin gray line showing the 120-gigabit cable that was Africa's only fibre optic...