There’s a few very good digital tech blogs out there including Cybernetnews, Mashable and ReadWriteWeb, each of them regularly post about the latest apps on the block; here’s one from ReadWriteWeb about a bunch of apps that have stood the test of time and another from Mashable about top sites for web savvy families. The developer community churn out thousands of apps a week, each one claiming to revolutionise our lives for the better, unfortunately the majority of these apps are likely to fail. Having said that a good deal of them will emerge from the market-place victorious, with a few healthy rounds of funding and a few million users to boot.

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As a Leeds United fan I’ve met my share of super-fans, those displaying such a quixotic level of support for their club that it consumes every part of their life - including their moods and general disposition. But, Leeds United is also well known for its intensely loyal and active wider support base (those who love the club but understand it is just a game) evidenced by the weekly gate receipts of 30,000+ and leedsunited.com having the 5th highest traffic in all the land; this is made all the more remarkable when you consider they now reside in the old 3rd division. I think one of the main reasons for this strong support base is actually the existence of a strong super-fan core, which acts as a powerful and firey centre generating a kind of gravitational pull on the wider fan base. 

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Jason Gonsalves, Head of Engagement at BBH talks about the changing communications landscape, how it’s affecting consumers and what the response should be from brands.

Sir John Hegarty

Sir John Hegarty joins Knitware to talk about the effect of digital technology on brands, craft and design.

Brands in a digital age

I think we live in a very confusing world. Technology is exploding all around us. We don’t need to all go into it, we all understand it. The fact that I’m sitting here blogging is an amazing development in technology and, if you’re a brand, what do you do? How do you navigate through all this stuff? In a way, you can’t. There is no blueprint for saying ‘This is how you do it’ - there isn’t a kind of formula that says, ‘Well you do a TV commercial, from the TV commercial you set up a website, when you’ve set up a website, you start doing that - blogs there, you go into video games…’ It can be a multitude of options.

In the end, when you’re in a world like that all you can really do is simply say, ‘Nobody really knows, so what I’ll do is try and think of better ideas.’ That’s the only guarantee. The guarantee is to say, ‘Actually I might be wrong in choosing that medium, I might be wrong in starting there, I might be wrong in doing that. But what I can do, what I do know, is if I have a great brand idea there’s a greater and better chance that that will communicate and get through,’ - and that’s the only guarantee. read full post »