The Twitter story just keeps going from strength to strength, its popularity and industry influence gaining all the time. Until recently the big question was how the company would monetise. How would it turn profile, popularity and adoption into cash?

The numbers, both terms of users (Twitter just hit 58 million users worldwide) and in venture capital pumped into the company have been growing rapidly. After Twitter’s recent $1 billion valuation and having raised a total of $55 million so far in private venture capital, with a further $50 lined up, the company has gone a long way to justifying the optimism – it has got into bed with Microsoft AND Google. In the process, as well as securing its future – a future now predicted to be long term, highly influential and highly profitable – Twitter has shaken up the search industry by introducing the concept of real time search to the masses. Read the rest of this entry »

Are you using your website to let your local audience know about your products and services?
Do you focus enough attention on potential customers looking for companies just like yours in your area?
When was the last time you used Yellow Pages?

Now 76% of UK adult Internet users find out about local services online – are they finding out about yours?

As a ‘local’ business you have a big advantage over other out of town competitors – big corporations and internationals. In their quest for relevance, Google is quick to identify that a search for a local business should offer users what they are looking for: a local solution. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s unlikely you will have escaped the hoopla and hype recently over Google Wave. It’s top trended on Twitter and even knocked Bing off the top of the tech news lists (even on Bing!). The initial batch of 100,000 invitations sent out by Google to Internet users wishing to trial a beta version landed in lucky inboxes at the tail end of September.

Google are talking big. They believe that Wave offers a ground-up reinvention of the way that people communicate and collaborate online. Google Software Engineering Manager Lars Rasmussen, defined Wave as “A single shared space where two or more users can exchange real time dialogue, photos, videos, maps and documents in what we call a Wave. Everyone can reply to a Wave, people can come and go and you can drag and drop information from all over the web.” Read the rest of this entry »

Whilst email usage continues to grow, social media adoption is growing faster. According to Nielsen in August 2009, 276.9 million people used email across the U.S., several European countries, Australia and Brazil, that’s up 21% from 229.2 million in August 2008. The number of users on social-networking and other community sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Bebo and Twitter jumped 31% to 301.5 million people during the same time.

Some say this represents the end of the line for email, that it’s a passive technology, old fashioned and doomed to extinction as people now become used to and expect a ‘real time’ web. They say that much in the same way that email replaced ‘snail mail’ physical post and mobile phone communication has to a large extent replaced land lines, now social media, permanently connected ‘live’ web access, the evolution of life streams that are rapidly turning into rivers of shared information will render email irrelevant, too slow, clumsy, too unresponsive. Read the rest of this entry »

In a recent report from Econsultancy and Lynchpin Analytics, 88% of companies are using Google Analytics to track the performance of their websites, compared to 66% last year. The survey of 800 predominantly UK-based companies found 23% were using Google’s free tool exclusively, compared to 14% a year ago, while 57% were using it in conjunction with another analytics platform. Excluding Google Analytics, Omniture was the most commonly used web analytics package with a 42% market share, followed by WebTrends. Read the rest of this entry »