by Herman Manson. Award recipients at the 2012 Bookmarks Awards are excellent speed walkers. Following the rules of the evening, they raced in a giant loop around the stage at the Artscape to receive their Pixels.
Category archives: Tech
Weekly Top 10: Fastest rising search terms from South Africans on Google
With the help of Google Trends we are publishing the top 10 searched for phrases (minus the sexy stuff of course) by South Africans on Google over the previous seven days.
News on Hurricane Sandy which hit the US East Coast last week dominates the list of fast rising searches for last week. The end of 1time also makes a local news break-through.
Fast rising searches
hurricane sandy latest Breakout
new york hurricane Breakout
sandy hurricane update Breakout
hurricane sandy +4,350%
sandy +2,950%
movember +850%
cnn +350%
new york +350%
1time +110%
arsenal +80%
Bookmarks 2012 winners
All the 2012 winners from the Bookmarks Awards! Congratulations from MarkLives & TREND. and remember to read our write-up on Monday morning!
Louise Marsland & MarkLives launches TREND.
MarkLives and well respected marketing and media commentator and editor Louise Marsland have teamed up to launch an exciting new market intelligence resource to the advertising, media and marketing communications industry in Southern Africa.
TREND. brings together the research savvy of Marsland with MarkLives’ cool and sexy take on the modern advertising world. TREND. launched this morning at trendlives.info and will focus on trend forecasting, in-depth reports, insight and analysis relevant to the broader marketing industry.
The site will serve as a central curated resource for local and international marketing and media research as well as create its own unique in-depth reports that sources and charts influential modern trends marketers and their agencies need to note.
As with MarkLives, TREND. will will offer its content free of charge, and will be supported by site and report sponsors. Ornico, Quirk, Machine Agency, 60layersofcake Cape Town and John Brown Media are the founding landing page sponsors for the site.
The first in-depth Dissect report to be published on TREND. focuses on socialising the enterprise. Compiled by Marsland and sponsored by Quirk, the report, which runs to over 11 000 words, sets forth the effects of a socialised consumer base on the modern enterprise. Content is broken in readily digestible pieces for the busy executive.
Social media is not about a suite of social networks and tools writes Marsland. “It is now about the social enterprise, the brand that integrates social across all platforms of engagement. It is about living social.”
Apple and Microsoft reveal their new strategic thinking
by Arthur Goldstuck (@art2gee) Last Thursday, the world changed – once again.
Microsoft’s launch of Windows 8 was the obvious, expected and long-planned main event. Not quite as expected or planned, Microsoft’s nemesis, Apple, announced its first disappointing financial results in many years.
The irony of this turning of the tables was that, just two days earlier, Apple had made its own biggest product announcement in its history. It had launched the new iPad mini 7.9” tablet, along with a fourth generation iPad, and new versions of its iconic iMac computer, MacBook Pro laptop and Mac mini computer.
Such an extensive upgrade of its range, the launch of a new format and the arrival of the iPad 4 barely six months after the previous version, represented a show of force by Apple. Coming – not coincidentally – two days before the launch of Windows 8, it sent a message that Apple was able to go large any time it wanted, and that it had not lost its touch for producing deeply desirable products.
At the same time, however, it revealed chinks in its armour. Crucially, the new 7.9” iPad mini represented the first major new product from Apple in more than a decade that did not lead the market. It was a response to the massive inroads made into its tablet market share by 7” tablets, in particular Amazon’s Kindle Fire.
Weekly Top 10: Fastest rising search terms from South Africans on Google
With the help of Google Trends we are publishing the top 10 searched for phrases (minus the sexy stuff of course) by South Africans on Google over the previous seven days.
Last week saw the release of the iPad Mini as well as Windows 8. Guess which brand caught more shine amongst South Africans!
Last of brands making the listing of fast rising searches last week including Gumtree, PSL, ABSA, BA, Dischem, Incredible Connection (thanks to the iPad Mini?), Mango and Netbank (Nedbank?).
The Bookmarks promises to grow up
by Herman Manson (@marklives) The Bookmarks Awards, the digital focussed awards evening, promises to be a much more settled affair this year, according to Bookmarks chairperson Nikki Cockcroft (@nikkicockcroft). In recent years the awards evening itself was better known for the general rebelliousness of its audience than for its role in showcasing stand-out work in the digital industry.
Entry levels have hit a record number, up to 590 this year from 453 in 2011, 400 in 2010, 229 in 2009 and 120 in 2008 – its launch year. The shortlist for the evening’s awards shows a mix of large and small, specialist and mainstream agencies. It sees agencies like The Jupiter Drawing Room, Ogilvy, 140 BBDO, Ireland Davenport, M&C Saatchi Abel, Machine, Joe Public and King James compete with digital experts like Quirk, Hellocomputer (recently acquired by Draftfcb), Prezence, Gloo and Native.
Cockcroft says she was especially pleased to see growth in the integrated campaign and social media categories this year.
Google Is Blackmail
by Bob Hoffman (@adcontrarian) The way I see it, Google is a brilliantly executed extortion racket.
The key concept to understand is that Google makes its money through misdirection.
They get nothing for directing you to the most accurate search result. They get paid to artfully direct you away from the most accurate search result.
Natural (free) search takes you to the most likely thing you’re searching for, according to their algorithms. Paid search takes you to the person who was willing to pay the most for the term you are searching. It is misdirection.
They are very clever about this. If the misdirection is too obvious or egregious, you’ll lose confidence in them and search elsewhere. They walk a fine line, and are careful about just how much misdirection is acceptable.
Thorsten Heins interview Pt 2: Secrets of BlackBerry 10
In the second part of this interview, RIM CEO Thorsten Heins tells Arthur Goldstuck about competing with Apple, how the BlackBerry’s notorious freezes have been overcome, and reveals the company’s secret weapon.
Thorsten Heins interview Pt 1: BlackBerry in Africa
In this interview RIM CEO Thorsten Heins tells us why BlackBerry 10 will restore faith among both consumers and investors and what makes the African market special..
Thorsten Heins, Chief Executive Officer of BlackBerry makers Research in Motion, was in Johannesburg last month to meet with mobile [GoldstuckHeins] network operators and introduce them to the BlackBerry 10 devices that will be launched in the first quarter of 2013. In the only interview he gave in South Africa, he spoke frankly with MarkLives columnist and Gadget editor-in-chief Arthur Goldstuck (@art2gee) about the challenges facing RIM.
Arthur Goldstuck: South Africans right now are still very loyal to BlackBerry and brand momentum is still growing. But at the same time, a lot of people are saying, ‘What is going to happen to us BlackBerry users?’ It comes down to the American market, where Blackberry has imploded. The feeling is that, what happens in America, will ultimately happen here. How does Blackberry plan to recapture the American market and therefore re-instill confidence in markets like South Africa and the rest of the developing markets?
Thorsten Heins: First and foremost, we appreciate the strong commitment of our customers to us in South Africa. This is a very, very successful market. It is a clear number one market for us, but not the only one. We have Indonesia where we are number one in smartphones. In the Philippines, I don’t know how many quarters consecutively we have been number one in smartphones. So there’s a broader business base than just in South Africa that we can appreciate. This is a customer base that carries us through to the transition to BlackBerry 10 right now.
The United States is very different. The US was very much driven by a tectonic shift to full touch screens devices among consumers and to LTE (4G connectivity) in a very short time frame in the enterprise space. All the marketing money from the carriers is going to 4G. All the major promotions: all the bus stops have a 4G sign on it. That is why we have lost and are still losing market share. But it is slowing down.
There are two routes to recapturing that market. Firstly, we are working on our installed user base. So far the upgrade ratio from BB 5 and BB 6 devices to BlackBerry 7 has increased from 8% BB 7 enterprise penetration to 22% in the last two quarters, which is really very significant.
The second thing is to get Blackberry 10 into the market and make sure it fulfills all users’ requirements, such as the full LTE experience. And there will be a touch version of it. But then we must also set BlackBerry 10 apart in terms of the user experience. So it’s not just competing on spec terms, not just competing on radio technology terms. We will go back to the market and we will, on top of that, compete on a new user paradigm that we are introducing with BlackBerry 10.
AG: Do you have a launch date yet?
TH: Last week, when we met with Verizon, they publicly stated, so its not a secret, that they will be launching Blackberry 10 in the first quarter of 2013. I would be very, very optimistic that other US carriers will follow suit.
We have a firm date when we will hit their labs for lab testing. As with every carrier, they have different cycle times for the testing cycle to get ready for first customer shipments. We’re working with the carriers on these launch dates, but it for sure will be in the first quarter 2013.