News in Degrees: 22° June | Surface | Megabox | Thimble | Menshn | Paypal

22 June 2012

New Initiatives

After the long awaited Microsoft event revealed that they were introducing a tablet to join the Apple dominated market with ‘Surface‘. Relatively late to the tablet market there has been a lot of speculation as to whether they will be able to make a dent next to the iPad.

Google have also decided to jump into the tablet battleground with an Asus collaboration to create a Nexus tablet, which will be revealed at Google I/O next week. This also follows last week’s news that Amazon will be launching their app store in Europe very soon, laying the foundation work for the arrival of Kindle Fire in the UK.

Kim Dotcom has been a name heard a lot due to the controversy of his arrest over MegaUpload. Still under arrest, he has now announced his new project ‘Megabox‘ with a screen shot, which will allow recording artists to directly sell their music to fans, allowing them to keep 90% of their earnings. There has been no confirmed date for the launch of the site.

Mozilla, the creator of popular web browser, Firefox, has released their own site creator ‘Thimble‘, challenging blogging sites such as WordPress. Although it is based on HTML and CSS, Matt Thompson from Mozilla was quoted saying Thimble “removes many of the barriers for novice users trying to learn code, and includes a series of starter projects and templates to help anyone get started quickly.”

Company Structuring

Dixons Retail, the company that owns Currys, PC World and the lesser-known Knowhow Movies, has released details of its increased in UK annual profits, despite an overall pre-tax loss, with like for like sales in the UK up 8%.

The Cannes Lions short lists were revealed last week, with only 5 UK agencies taking places, including DDB UK leading the way for their work with Harvey Nichols and Volkswagen.

Facebook officially acquired Face.com this week, with rumours suggesting they paid $60m. The start-up from Israel could mean a lot of new features for Facebook’s mobile app and their website but they haven’t made any statements as to the future of it as of yet.

Industry Moves

Simon Lloyd, Director of Media Engagement Marketing and Audience at the BBC, has left his role to join Virgin Atlantic as their Marketing Director. He replaces Paul Dickinson who left the airline 6 months ago to join Christie’s auction house.

Simon Wainwright, formerly of T-Mobile and Tesco, has joined magazine publisher Future as their new Market Research Director, making him the lead in a Market Research team of about 6.

Social Media

Louise Mensch, the author and MP, has now released a rival to Twitter called ‘Menshn‘ after the popular Twitter user got frustrated with the site and wanted a platform where conversations on topic.

Nike this week became the first UK Company to have their Twitter campaign banned after the ASA deemed advertisement tweets by celebrities, including Wayne Rooney, to be unclear on their purpose.

Digital Product

Paypal have redesigned their website and have begun rolling it out across users in the US, with introduction to global users will come shortly after, they announced in an official blog post on Wednesday.

Research into the new WiFi in underground stations has found that at 12.7Mb it is a faster connection than that of the average home (a meagre 7.6Mb in comparison), allowing users to stream content easily. There is speculation as to whether the speeds will remain so high, but most are not optimistic with the Olympics putting pressure on the transport services in London – particularly the underground.

The Rest

LeWeb London opened its doors this week to an enthusiastic crowd, with tickets completely sold out and #leweb trending on Twitter. The Wall Blog has written its top ten of Day 2 at LeWeb to give a little insight into the day.

Apple employees have now got further discount of $500 off of a Mac and $250 off of an iPad to go on top of their 25% staff discount, after Tim Cook fulfilled his promise made in January.

Have a great weekend.