Mobile

Is podcasting about to get its tipping point?

Neville Hobson Leave a comment Advertising, Communication, Entertainment, Innovation, Marketing, Mobile, Podcasting, Software, Technology
Podcasts

There’s been quite a sense of anticipation, if not excitement, among podcasters about Apple’s announcement last week on some significant enhancements the company is making this autumn to its podcast app for iPhones and other iOS devices. The big change in the app is potentially a game-changer for podcasting as it will provide podcasters with basic analytics functionality to offer evidence of listening behaviours by subscribers (where they paused in a podcast, how much of it they listened to, did they listen to all of it, etc) rather than just metrics on downloads (how many downloads, which country are downloaders in, what directory listing did they click, etc). In simple terms, it means podcasters will now be able to answer […]

Continue reading

Privacy, WhatsApp and Facebook: a matter of trust

Neville Hobson 7 Comments Advertising, Communication, Marketing, Mobile, Reputation, Social Media, Software
WhatsApp

WhatsApp has been getting a bit of stick this past week with news of changes to its terms and privacy policy that will allow the messaging service to share your usage behaviours and other data with Facebook. […] by coordinating more with Facebook, we’ll be able to do things like track basic metrics about how often people use our services and better fight spam on WhatsApp. And by connecting your phone number with Facebook’s systems, Facebook can offer better friend suggestions and show you more relevant ads if you have an account with them. For example, you might see an ad from a company you already work with, rather than one from someone you’ve never heard of. There’s more to […]

Continue reading

Give your chatbot some real personality

Neville Hobson 13 Comments Artificial Intelligence, Business, Communication, Ethics, Experiences, IBM, Innovation, Mobile, Public Relations, Society, Software, Technology, Workplace

Chatbots are all the rage at the moment. These clever computer programs (algorithms, to be more precise) are popping up everywhere online to help you with mundane tasks from getting a weather forecast or currency exchange rate to travel planning to online shopping. Organizations everywhere are experimenting with these useful bits of technology, with varying degrees of success as part of the learning process (remember what happened to Microsoft’s Tay earlier this year?). If you use Siri on your iPhone, Cortana on a Windows 10 device, or say “Okay Google” on your Android device, arguably you’re using a chatbot. For the first two, Apple and Microsoft respectively sometimes describe these tools as “personal digital assistants” (PDA: there’s a déjà vu […]

Continue reading

Meet the omni-channel experience that is Wimbledon 2016

Neville Hobson 23 Comments Business, Communication, Events, Experiences, IBM, Innovation, Marketing, Mobile, Public Relations, Social Media, Software, Sport, Technology, Web

The Championships, Wimbledon 2016 started yesterday, June 27, and run until July 10. During these two weeks of intense competition, Wimbledon and the competing players will be names and brands in an event that will not only be on television screens large and small across the globe in real time and recorded, but also available and accessible on myriad devices, from smartwatches to big-screen PCs, almost anything that can connect to the global internet any time anywhere. To be sure, there’s a terrific amount of great tennis to interest and captivate tennis fans as the process of elimination in these championships reaches its culmination in the finals on the Centre and No 1 Courts on Sunday July 10. The courts will […]

Continue reading

Hyper reality: merging physical and virtual realities

Neville Hobson 4 Comments Artificial Intelligence, Business, Communication, Experiences, Innovation, Marketing, Mobile, Society, Software, Technology, Virtual Communities, Wearable Tech, Web

Augmented reality will be a huge part of our individual and collective experiences in the not too distant future. Our daily lives will be like a journey in virtual reality except in actual reality, immersively overlaid with personalized information that we will engage with, where everything we do is part of a giant contest that awards points to reward behaviours and actions. This is a future vision that I think is persuasively presented in a high-definition video (embedded below) that runs a little over six minutes, created by London based designer and film-maker Keiichi Matsuda. It’s a project Matsuda calls Hyper Reality: Hyper-Reality presents a provocative and kaleidoscopic new vision of the future, where physical and virtual realities have merged, […]

Continue reading