Recently, we put up the 10 most used Android Apps by Canadians. Eighth on that list was Connexinet's Tim Hortons Finder.
Connexinet's founder Samir Al-Battran realized that Canadian mobile app developers were not really building Android apps, so he took it upon himself in his free time over the past couple of years to build apps targeted to Canadians to compensate for the lack of Canadian content on the Android Market.
read more
Vancouver's Summify announced this morning on their blog that they have been acquired by Twitter.
Congrats to Romanian co-founders Mircea Pașoi and Cristian Strat (pictured below). Terms of the transaction are not known at this time.
Our long-term vision at Summify has always been to connect people with the most relevant news for them, in the most time efficient manner. As hundreds of millions of people worldwide are signing up and consuming Twitter, we realized it’s the best platform to execute our vision at a truly global scale. Since Twitter shared this vision with us, joining the company made perfect sense.
But don't worry Summify fans, the current product won't be shelved anytime soon although they have disabled new account registration and will be removing a number of key features.
read more
Many Canadians don't really think brands and social networks mix. According to new data from research firm TNS Canada, 54% of Canadians don't want to engage with brands on social networks. Calling it a "digital wasteland" for businesses, TNS vice president Ron Caughlin says that "winning and maintaining brand loyalty is now harder than ever."
Even so, 44% of consumers agree that they'd consider engaging with a brand recommended by a friend. "The online world presents massive opportunitiy for brands," Ron notes, but "misguided digital strategies are generating mountains of digital waste, making it harder for brands to be heard."
read more
Some people are happy with 100 followers; others, 1,000. Some don't care at all, while others have dreams of hitting 100,000. Twitter is a vast community, and many of its users are content creators or curators, so it benefits those people to maximize their following. Now over 5 years old and with more than 200 million users, I was curious to see how many accounts have entered the Million Followers Club.
According to my research, there are nearly 700 Twitter users with one million or more followers—691 at the time of writing this, although someone new enters the club about twice a week these days. The most recently added member is actress Christina Applegate, and rapper Lupe Fiasco looks poised to be number 692. This club represents about 0.00003% of total users, so it's a very exclusive membership.
read more
Yesterday, Google announced salient changes to its search engine. Most notably, it placed an emphasis on Google+.
We’re […] introducing three new features:
1. Personal Results, which enable you to find information just for you, such as Google+ photos and posts—both your own and those shared specifically with you, that only you will be able to see on your results page;
2. Profiles in Search, both in autocomplete and results, which enable you to immediately find people you’re close to or might be interested in following; and,
3. People and Pages, which help you find people profiles and Google+ pages related to a specific topic or area of interest, and enable you to follow them with just a few clicks. Because behind most every query is a community.
This immediately caught the eye of venture capitalist and tech journalist MG Siegler, who called the move "a slippery slope for Google" and believes the U.S. Justice Department will launch another antitrust inquiry on the company as a result.
read more
What's the top brand on Twitter? Why, Twitter, of course.
Vancouver startup HootSuite today released Part 2 of its Twitter 2011 Trends, courtesy of What the Trend?, a company it acquired in 2011. An infographic indexes a few lists such as the top 15 brands on Twitter, the top 10 trending topics, the top 10 hashtag trends, and the top 10 "in memorium" trends, and the top 10 holiday trends.
Just barely squeaking it at number 15 on the Top Twitter Brands list was Waterloo's Research In Motion. The BlackBerry maker was the lone Canadian company on the list, but tech companies overall were popular: Google, Facebook, Apple, HP, NetFlix, PlayStation, and even MySpace made the list (is it sad that MySpace still manages to trump RIM by a wide margin?).
read more
Three Facebook users die every minute, leading to millions of worldwide accounts that have deceased owners. Will the account remain as it were, frozen in time? Is that how the person who passed would have preferred it? A new hot topic is posthumous "online reputation management," which looks at how friends and family can retain control of the online legacies of the dead.
“While many people prepare a will to manage what happens to their possessions after their death, most have likely not considered what happens to their digital information,” said Jeff Quipp, the founder of Canadian internet marketing company Search Engine People. “Photos from wild parties might not be the lasting impression a person may wish to leave when they die.”
read more
Minhee Cho ordered Papa Johns yesterday evening. She wanted pizza… but she got blatant racism instead. This afternoon, Minhee tweeted to Papa Johns after noticing something a little off about her "name":
Hey @PapaJohns just FYI my name isn't "lady chinky eyes" http://twitpic.com/84epmb
Yep, you read that right. An employee at Papa Johns punched Minhee's name into the computer as "lady chinky eyes," a racial slur against Asians.
Almost immediately, a flurry of retweets spurred well over 30,000 views in just a couple of hours, spiralling the incident into a viral firestorm of consumer fury. The Huffington Post got ahold of the store manager, who half-heartedly apologized, saying that the employee probably "didn't mean any harm." The manager, identified only as Marjani, said that the employee would be disciplined but did not clarify what sort of disciplinary action would take place.
read more
If Twitter can accurately represent the English-speaking world, then new research reveals that our overall happiness is on the decline. A team of scientists from the University of Vermont constructed a "happiness graph" based on a detailed and thorough study of tweets on the microblogging platform.
Not long after Twitter decided to put promoted tweets in non-followers' streams, Facebook has now determined it's a tactic worth copying. Probably realizing absolutely no one clicks or even sees the ads on the far right of its interface, Facebook is rolling out in January "Sponsored Stories," which will appear in your news feed like a friend's status update.