This Week in Digital: w/c March 5th

 
What’s happened this week:

• Mobile World Congress 2012 has passed with : 
  • Eric Schmidt’s vision of the future: smart phones for all and 1GB bandwidth delivering everything in more places.
  • Facebook’s focus on open standards in mobile and cracking the mobile payment problem.
  • Some amazing new mobile technologies.
  • The Facebook Marketing Conference in New York saw the launch of a number of new marketing products such as Timeline for brand pages, the reach generator and ads on mobile.
  • Apple’s market capitalisation crossed half a trillion US dollars, making them the world’s most valued company by over USD 100bn.

 What we have learned:

• 25% of global smart phone users have made a purchase on their handset.
• 4x as many iPlayer shows are delivered to the iPad as all connected TVs combined, despite being in only half as many homes.
• 25bn iOS apps have now been downloaded meaning that the average iOS user has 80 apps and the average app is downloaded 45k times.

 Cool stuff

• ‘Hacking for brands’ OMD in New York brought developers and brands together for a 48 hour hackathon creating all sorts of new ideas.
• Cloud computing is an abstract concept, but Apple explain it elegantly in 30s with no words.
• Fantasy Shopper is an interesting British startup that aims to transform shopping behaviours with game mechanics, The Economist thinks that they are on to something.

 Where to find more:

• The Gamification of Business: Games and game theory are being implemented in enterprises around the world.
• ‘I’m being followed’ An interesting in depth look in to ad targeting and why it is a necessary part of the funding ecosystem of web content. 
• Consumer 2.0: How brands are adapting to new consumer needs.

- Sam (thanks to JP and the Futures group)