Northern Lights caused by solar flares that could disrupt technological networks
What a week it has been for news! First up is the new Apple iPad, which has been eagerly anticipated and certainly didn’t disappoint, with a high-definition retina display, fabulous picture editing functionality and an improved camera dubbed ‘iSight’. It will be able to connect to high-speed 4G, though only people in the states will benefit form that initially. Tech editor Charles Arthur tells us more. And, as has become usual with the launch of a new Apple gadget, it has triggered a surge in the offloading of the old ones.
Also this week David Abraham, head of Channel 4, let loose a new hybrid on the broadcast landscape: a linear TV channel shaped by online social media. As reported in the FT, at whose digital conference it was revealed, Abraham said that plumbing word of mouth to shape programming is “a kind of reverse [programming guide], that will schedule content that is creating noise – amongst commentators, bloggers, Twitter, Facebook and of course via contact our viewers are now able to have directly with us.” ie the content will be chosen by people via social sharing, not algorithms… looks like magic to us!
While at the other end of the ‘programming’ scale, demand for the Raspberry Pi is currently running at 700 per second, with one Middle Eastern country planning on giving one to every schoolgirl.
Privacy issues continue to dominant the landscape, with new research finding that the data of UK Android phone users is being passed to a US advertising network called MobClix, in what looks like a breach of European data protection laws.
Mobclix are owned by Velti, a US-based company which claims to be the largest mobile marketing company in the world, and so really should be up to speed, one would think, on data protection. Currently they are refusing to respond to Channel 4 – probably because they think being the largest they are somehow immune, which is probably less than wise given the social storm that could potentially break. As we all well know (or should do given how many examples of malpractice we keep flagging up), a crisis is always best nipped in the bud as early as possible rather than allowing it to spread out virally through social networking, regardless of your size.
Google is another company that appears to think size somehow equal immunity, and who now Britain’s deputy information commissioner and data protection head, David Smith, has them in his sights following their privacy policy launch on 1st March, which he says is too vague and that “The requirement under the UK Data Protection Act is for a company to tell people what it actually intends to do with their data, not just what it might do at some unspecified point in future.”
The lesson here is that after a slow start the regulators and public are fast catching up with the old ‘wild west’ style internet leaders and show every sign, with the public’s support, of bringing them to heel.
Meanwhile the potential for digital communications to efface a major, global change was also on show this week in the Stop Kony campaign by Invisible Children. The video has had 14.8million views to date and swiftly went viral, fuelled by retweets and shares across Facebook and Twitter, just proving yet again that you can never predict what will – and won’t – hit the magic ‘viral’ button, as it’s a long and upsetting video, the charity has come in for some stick about how it conducts itself, and it’s hardly ‘news’ in the way we would normally understand it – as Musa Okwonga says in the Independent, it’s been going on for decades, almost certainly with the tacit support of those in power – yet it’s been a model of digital campaigning, achieving in a couple of weeks a level of awareness of a three-decade atrocity that few people had heard of unless they had links to the country. For which we raise our hats to Invisible Children.
Another major cultural shift that the internet is helping to bring about, one tweet at a time, is the status of women in many Middle Eastern countries, as highlighted this week by International Women’s Day coverage across the social media platforms.
So it seems as though even in the Arab Spring uprisings and other political movements driven by social media, women are the driving force online, something that research by Porter Novelli has recently confirmed and as was presented at Social Media Week in London. Key UK findings for digital marketeers were:
- Women are more socially active than men: 65% of women access social media at least once a week, compared with 51% of men
- Women are more likely to connect with people they know: 93% of women using social media do so to read posts/view pictures from friends or to comment on their friends’ profiles. For men the numbers dropped to 89% and 84% respectively.
- UK women lead the rest of Europe in following brands to access deals and offers – this is the motivation for around 64% of women in social media, compared to a European average of just 52%, and 56% among UK men.
- Men are more likely to use social networks to display status and opinions. In the UK, 45% of men use social media to check into places compared with just 33% of women. Men are also happier to broadcast what they’re saying to the world: 35% of socially-savvy men are Twitter users compared to 27% of women.
Findings that were back up in another of our specialist areas, travel, where a study by Auto Europe found that the average traveller is a 47 year old woman, that women are the most avid travelers over all, especially of nature, culture and adventure trips, and make 80% of all travel decisions, which basically seems to mean that there is a lot of 80 year old grannies currently leaping around the world! Travel companies, you have been warned.
In other social travel news, Facebook has unveiled its plans for Gowalla, while Foursquare have gone open source for their maps, dumping Google, and the frustrating quest for that elusive parking space could finally be solvable via Twitter with the new application by Mercedes that is to be fitted as standard in their new cars.
In other news, Tweet-a-Beer has developed a web tool that was rolled out at South by Southwest and lets you get a round in via Twitter, with the help of Chirpify and PayPal, while the populisation of gaming via social networks has led to the rise and rise of virtual currency, which looks set to become the Next Big Thing.
And finally, the beautiful Northern Lights we have all been enjoying via images or, in some lucky cases, in person, are down to the cycle of solar activity, which is expected to peak in 2013. The downside of it is the increased likelihood that solar flares will disrupt the Earth’s magnetic field, affecting everything from GPS to airline flights and power stations.
The Washington Post has some good advice and finger’s crossed it’ll just be our GPS that’s affected…
