Social Media, Digital Marketing & PR Agency

Skype’s international phone-calling traffic has accelerated at a time when international telephone traffic has slowed, according to a new report by TeleGeography.

Skype traffic has been soaring despite the background of slowing growth by
conventional phone companies, according to the report. Where international
calling volumes from telephones was growing at a compounded annual rate of
15% for the past 25 years, over the past two years it has slowed down to
only 8%. Skype however has seen its international cheap calls volume sky
rocket.

In a press statement from TeleGeography, analyst Stephan Beckert commented,
“Demand for international voice has been remarkably robust, but it’s
clearly not recession-proof”.

However, the statement went on to highlight that Skype was managing to very successfully buck the trend, with on-net international Skype-to-Skype traffic growing by 51% in 2008, and a projected growth of 63% in 2009, to a massive 54 billion minutes.

“The volume of traffic routed via Skype is tremendous,” said Beckert.

This increase in international calling minutes experienced by Skype has
brought its market share up to 12% in 2009, and made Skype the “largest
provider of cross border communications in the world, by far”, according to
Beckert.

The success experienced by Skype can be further demonstrated by a recent
company journal report which showed that on the 19th January 2010 the
service experienced an all-time record number of concurrent logged on users
with over 22 and a quarter million clients signed in to Skype at the same
time. This record comes only shortly after the previous record of 21.5
million concurrent users was logged the previous Monday.

Barcelona, February 17 2010 – Today Mobile IQ  announced that it is
developing the BBC’s first official iPhone applications – which will be
focused on news and sport.

The first app will be launched in early April and will offer audiences a
breaking news service with the very latest stories. It will provide the
same distinctive content already available on the broadcaster’s website
such as features and analysis, reports from correspondents around the world
and a wide range of live and on-demand audio and video content.

Users will be able to personalise their news experience and more features
will be added throughout the year.

A BBC Sport application will launch on the iPhone in time for the 2010
World Cup with live match experience at the heart of the application.

For the World Cup, football fans will be able to access live match video
whenever it’s being broadcast on TV by the broadcaster and on-demand clips
of every goal scored in the tournament.

Users will also be able to enjoy more of the broadcaster’s other unique
content on mobile, such as 5 Live, authored live text commentaries from the
Corporation’s presenters and blogs. Later in the year, the broadcaster
will create even more value from its sports rights, by adding Formula 1 and
coverage of other sports

Mobile IQ was chosen following a competitive pitch involving 20-plus mobile
application vendors. Selection criteria hinged on the ability to develop a
creative and intuitive iPhone experience.

Mobile IQ has a distinguished pedigree in helping content providers
mobilise their content, having developed mobile apps and mobile websites
for major brands such as Channel 4, Maxim and The Guardian – as well as
niche publications such as the British Medical Journal.

Shaun Barriball, Managing Director of Mobile IQ, said: “BBC content is
revered around the world. Our aim is to help the organisation reach wider
audiences in new and compelling ways. The iPhone platform gives us an ideal
canvas with which to deliver an entirely new consumer experience for news
and sport.”

Erik Huggers Director of Future Media & Technology BBC showed demos of the
new applications during a keynote speech at Mobile World Congress earlier
today.

At The Media Marketing Co offices we do like to take a breeze through the ‘papers’, well hundreds of websites actually, on a daily basis.

And as we predicted, a number of stories are cropping up on a weekly basis (it will be daily soon) about large companies (Vodafone is one that has been mentioned this week) that are running into trouble with their Social Media campaigns (a member of staff put up a rude Tweet).

Today we see that lawyers are warning employers that they must take a more serious attitude towards Social Media as it is now such a powerful tool, the damage caused by unapproved activity that is directly linked to a company name, can be very serious.  The Tory party have twigged this and all prospective candidates in the forthcoming election must have SM messages approved by head office.

We urge all our clients to treat Social Media messages as though they were mini press releases, and tweeting etc must be carried out by approved personnel who are aware of the marketing and branding objectives of the company.

As the lawyers are warning, the consequences can be serious.

Sunbelt Software, a provider of Windows security software, today announced the top 10 most prevalent malware threats for the month of January 2010.

The report, compiled from monthly scans performed by Sunbelt’s award-winning anti-malware solution, VIPRE® Antivirus+ Antispyware, and its antispyware tool, CounterSpy®, is a service of SunbeltLabs™.

In January, the malware landscape remained remarkably similar to December, according to Sunbelt Software ThreatNet statistics. The top seven detections were the same as December, but in a slightly different order. In December and January, six of the top 10 detections were Trojan horse programs.

Trojan.Win32.Generic!BT – a generic detection for Trojans that comprised nearly one quarter (23.15 percent) of all the malware found. It remained in the top position for the third month in a row, growing by nearly 20 percent
from 18.69 percent of all detections in December. It is a detection that includes many downloaders associated with scareware or rogue security products.

After holding the top spot on the list for most of 2009, the password-stealing Trojan-Spy.Win32. Zbot.gen held the second position on the list for the third consecutive month, decreasing from 6.23 to 4.91 percent of all detections.

“I think we can expect to see Trojan horse programs continue to be the top detections for the foreseeable future,” said Michael St. Neitzel, Sunbelt Software vice president of Threat Research. “Trojans used to download and install a wide variety of other malware and those are the real moneymakers for the bad guys.”

Other Trojans in the top 10 were:

– Trojan.Win32.Generic!SB.0
– Trojan.Win32.Malware
– Trojan.ASF.Wimad (v)
– Trojan.HTML.FakeAlert.a (v)

Meanwhile, three new detections moved onto this month’s top 10 list.
Virtumonde – a general description of an adware program with many
versions of pop up advertising – constituted 1.23 percent of overall
detections. Packed.Win32.TDSS.aa.3 (v) – a sophisticated rootkit and
Trojan that is used primarily to redirect search engine results – made up
1.21 percent. Finally, Trojan.HTML.FakeAlert.a (v) – a detection for an
HTML file which replaces a desktop background and works with other rogue
malware – made up just under one percent of all detections.

The top 10 results represent the number of times a particular malware
infection was detected during VIPRE and CounterSpy scans that report back
to ThreatNet, Sunbelt’s community of opt-in users. These threats are
classified as moderate to severe based on method of installation among
other criteria established by SunbeltLabs. The majority of these threats
propagate through stealth installations or social engineering.

The top 10 most prevalent malware threats for the month of January are:

1. Trojan.Win32.Generic!BT 23.15%
2. Trojan-Spy.Win32.Zbot.gen 4.91%
3. Exploit.PDF-JS.Gen (v) 4.55%
4. Trojan.Win32.Generic!SB.0 2.40%
5.   Trojan.Win32.Malware 1.93%
6. Trojan.ASF.Wimad (v) 1.92%
7. INF.Autorun (v) 1.46%
8. Virtumonde 1.23%
9. Packed.Win32.TDSS.aa.3 (v) 1.21%
10. Trojan.HTML.FakeAlert.a (v) 0.98%

The growing popularity of smartphones and their applications is having a game changing effect on brand marketing strategies according to Punch Communications.

Phones such as the iPhone and Nexus One have been just part of the massive
growth in popularity of mobile technology over the course of 2009, with
many consumers taking advantage of mobile internet access to engage with
their preferred online communities and social networks on a far more
regular basis.

With research group Nielsen reporting substantial growth in mobile internet
usage, there is a huge opportunity for brands to engage with their users
through the implementation of brand focused applications for smartphones
such as the iPhone. The ability an interactive application to engage users
and provide a genuine service to them can potentially be a game changer in
help a brand to stand out from the crowd explains Pete Goold, Managing
Director of PR Agency Punch:

“Mobile phone applications that provide a genuine service or solve a
user’s problem can have a significant impact on the way that a brand is
perceived. Whether it is an app that facilitates the creation of user
generated content, such as Nike’s “Nike True City” app, or an app
that provides simple solutions for users like Jamie Oliver’s app, this
engagement can go a long way to influencing consumer perception”.