Web 2.0 Suicide Machine

Posted by Dave CollinsGeneral

“Tired of your Social Network? Liberate your newbie friends with a Web2.0 suicide! This machine lets you delete all your energy sucking social-networking profiles, kill your fake virtual friends, and completely do away with your Web2.0 alterego. The machine is just a metaphor for the website which moddr_ is hosting; the belly of the beast where the web2.0 suicide scripts … Read More

Is the iPad killing the software industry?

Posted by Dave CollinsDigital Marketing, General

The iPad is a remarkable device. My three year-old little girl learnt how to use it within minutes, I learnt how to use it within an hour or so, and it beautifully highlights almost all of the problems of working with PCs. Buying software couldn’t be simpler. There are no minimum system requirements, no drivers, no runtimes or codecs needed, … Read More

Digital coupons opportunity?

Posted by Dave CollinsDigital Marketing, General

A recent report issued by Coupons.com indicates impressive growth in the popularity of digital coupons: “Printed savings from Coupons.com and the Coupons.com digital network for the 12 months ending June 2010 exceeded $1 billion. This includes savings printed or loaded to a store loyalty card and represents a 100 percent increase compared to $529 million the year before.“ Easy to … Read More

Great deal, bad design

Posted by Dave CollinsGeneral

I just received an email from one of the UK’s main grocery outlets. The email looked clean, fresh and inviting. For each of the offers they had a picture of the product, the name, price, saving and original price. Here’s what I found interesting. I was more interested in the original price (shown with a line through it) than the … Read More

How and why most of the world needs Facebook sexual health in their advertising

Posted by Dave CollinsGeneral, Google Ads

Research by Dan Zarrella suggests that certain words have a greater impact in social media than others. The Most Facebook-Shareable Words vs. The Least Shareable Words on Facebook. Not exactly a great surprise, but the research also found that “techie and social-media dork favorite topics like Twitter, Google, and the iPhone aren’t very popular with the mainstream Facebook audience“. So … Read More

Grow up: the web is not another dimension!

Posted by Dave CollinsGeneral

The internet has been with us for some time now, so why do the media continue to portray it as something new, dark and fearful? Newspapers and news websites are full of stories like “woman murdered by internet date“, “internet use linked to depression“, “does the internet reinforce prejudices” and more. All of these are actual headlines from the BBC … Read More

Do Facebook ads work?

Posted by Dave CollinsGeneral

You’ve probably noticed the ads that run down the right hand side of your Facebook pages. In theory they’re specifically targeting you – based on the information taken from your Facebook profile, including your age, interests, connections, education and more. In theory. So if the technology truly works, ads that I see and those that my wife sees should be … Read More

The 1000 most-visited sites on the web

Posted by Dave CollinsGeneral, Google Ads

Google have released a list of the top 1,000 websites as measured by Ad Planner. The list categorises each website, and also includes unique visitors, reach, page views and whether or not they have advertising. Interestingly Google are also allowing advertisers to specify that they only want their content network ads to show up on the sites in this list. … Read More

Around the world in 14 days

Posted by Dave CollinsGeneral

For those of you who have been following my exploits, after being stranded in Shanghai by volcanic ash, I’m now home. The incredible fact is that within 14 days I flew the whole way round the world. From London to Shanghai, Shanghai to Chicago, Chicago to Newark and finally Newark to London. To describe the experience as taxing on the … Read More

Stranded by volcanic ash

Posted by Dave CollinsGeneral

Last week I attended and spoke at the Chinese Software Global Summit in Shanghai. Thanks to the oddity of a volcanic erruption in Iceland, my flight back to the UK was cancelled on Saturday, leaving me stranded in Shanghai for at least a few weeks. I’m now working from Chicago in the US, as it has to be easier to … Read More