Richard MacManus

We’re well into the second week of the London 2012 Olympics, so which media website is winning with its online coverage? NBC fell at the first hurdle with its TV scheduling, but did the network get back into the race with its website? What about the New York Times, with its muscular web development? Or … Read more

My post about podcasting earlier this week attracted a lot of insightful comments. There were also a few insulting comments, but overall the feedback showcased what makes podcasts worth consuming: passionate voices. Not coincidentally, passion is also what makes blogs a vital part of the media world. So the point of my article wasn’t to … Read more

While listening to a Spotify playlist from music discovery service We Are Hunted, I came across an intriguing artist I hadn’t heard of before: Montag. I starred the song, called ‘True Love’, and a bit later went back to explore more of Montag’s music. It turns out he is in the middle of a project, … Read more

Podcasters are to radio what bloggers are to newspapers: independent voices taking attention away from mainstream media. At least that was the theory, when professional podcasts and blogs were getting started in the 2000s. But unlike blogs, podcasts by indie voices have not gone on to seriously challenge the mainstream media incumbents. Where is the … Read more

One of the top four trends identified in Rock Health’s report on digital health was data / analytics. Arguably, big data is the most important factor in transforming the healthcare system – given the vast amount of genetic and other medical data available today, combined with the increasing prevalence of mobile health apps and EMRs … Read more

One of the top trends in digital health is wearable body sensors. The Nike+ sensor shoe is the Usain Bolt of this market, with its flashy image and impressive results. Startup Fitbit has also gained a lot of traction, with its small clip-on device. But still in the race for gold is a dot-com veteran, … Read more

Digital health is a hot market right now, with funding levels having tripled over the past year. Y Combinator graduate drchrono is one of many scrappy young startups aiming to change the stodgy old healthcare system. Indeed, drchrono strikes at one of the core problems of traditional healthcare: paperwork. Drchrono is an EMR (Electronic Medical … Read more

It’s not just mobile health (mHealth) that is growing fast. The overall digital health sector – which includes mHealth, B2B apps and consumer services such as ZocDoc – is also rapidly expanding. That’s if venture capital funding is anything to go by. A report by financial services company Burrill & Company states that private financings … Read more

mHealth is an emerging trend in technology. It stands for ‘mobile healthcare’ and means utilizing smartphones and medical mobile devices to help diagnose and monitor health conditions. According to a new research paper from the Economist Intelligence Unit (commissioned by PwC), the adoption of mHealth will be slow in the healthcare industry. That’s due to … Read more

In our half-yearly review of the top Internet trends of 2012, there’s been a common theme: mobile is the main driver for all of them. The Visual Web (Instagram, Pinterest and similar image-focused apps), the Consumer Cloud (Evernote, Dropbox, iCloud and others), social video apps (Socialcam and Viddy) and video on tablets (BuzzFeed, Flipboard and … Read more

Continuing our review of the first half of 2012, we look at an emerging product type that became popular this year: social video apps. The two leading contenders are Socialcam and Viddy, each vying to be the breakout app. But at least one of those apps is using dubious seeding tactics to get ahead… After … Read more

YouTube has come to define the era of online video, so let’s take a look at its most popular videos of all time. Our latest update has Justin Bieber still at number one with Baby, which was the first video to earn a half a billion views. Also of note is Jennifer Lopez’s video, On … Read more

One year ago, Google+ launched to the world and was greeted with the collective cry, “Not another social network!” But over the past year Google+ has cemented its position as one of the Big Three social networks, alongside Facebook and Twitter. Or has it? Google+ boasts similar user numbers to Twitter, but if we look … Read more

Over June, the Facebook app of travel reviews site TripAdvisor has increased its Monthly Active Users (MAU) by over 67 percent. It now has 31 million MAU, moving it up to fourth on AppData’s Facebook Apps Leaderboard – just above the ever-popular MyCalendar birthday app and Zynga’s top ‘Ville game CityVille. What makes it even … Read more

Continuing our mid-year review of the top trends of 2012, in this post we look at the emergence of the Visual Web. Two of the hottest products in the first half of 2012 are the best examples of this phenomenon: Pinterest and Instagram. But one or two swallows don’t make a summer. Beautiful design is … Read more