By AncaThere is a festival in town! SXSW Interactive started on Friday, and Mashable helps you answer this question: What are you doing at SXSW to help your business? Great timing, as Apple just launched the new iPad, which, apparently is ‘resolutionary’. Excited? ReadWriteWeb discusses the new version of the tablet. At about the same time, Square, the mobile payment company, launched its new Register iPad application, which aims to replace cash registers.
Facebook revealed a bunch of things this week. Like the one about the 13% of its users accessing the social network exclusively through mobile devices. And the one about the 42 million fake accounts. And that 15million Facebook users bought virtual goods with credits in 2011. Payments from virtual goods and other fees made up about 15% of total revenue. The remaining… $3.154 billion came from advertising. However, don’t forget that Facebook pages are changing, and that means your business strategy will need to change too. On top of everything, it introduces interest lists and brings focus to subscribed content, while the US government agencies and colleges are demanding access to Facebook accounts (?!).
A new report from eMarketer reveals that Twitter’s growth is exploding in the U.S., as Facebook’s slows to single digits for the first time. Great timing again, as Twitter is preparing to introduce e-commerce features for brand pages, part of their new focus on generating advertising revenue. Talking about ‘explosions’, Wired mentioned something about a new research according to which 14 million jobs will be created by 2012 thanks to cloud computing. It looks like 2012 is also the year for change in online sports streaming.
According to TechCrunch, Instagram is poised to pick up another round of funding worth about $40 million, which will value the startup at $500 million. If you don’t know already, the photo touch-up and sharing app, doesn’t make a penny in revenue from consumers. In the charity sector, the Red Cross and Dell launched an inspired and useful initiative: the first social media-monitoring platform dedicated to humanitarian relief.
Here’s a question for the weekend: Do two screens create television-watching heaven?
Since we’re at it, here’s another one: Does it still make sense to buy DVDs?
While you’re rummaging through your CD/DVD collection, you might feel the urge to ‘virtually’ check out a free parking space or tweet a beer. Yes, as of this week you can do this too. Cheers!
