Backers & Hackers Start Playing With App.net

Over the weekend, budding Twitter competitor App.net reached its funding goal of $500,000. Already the service has an alpha website and an API, allowing backers and hackers alike to play with it. As to be expected, the early users are geeky – and mostly male. It’s fun watching a nascent service find its legs. In … Read more

Olympics Online: Who Wins The Gold Medal For Best Website?

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

5 Things I Love About Podcasting

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

Music Innovators: Montag Reimagines the Album

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

Radio Killed The Podcasting Star

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

Thinking Big About Big Data: GNS Tackles Personalized Healthcare

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

Investment in Digital Health Triples Over Past Year

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

Diagnosis Promising For mHealth

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

Top Trends of 2012: The Continuing Rapid Growth of Mobile

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

Top 10 YouTube Videos of All Time

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