Yahoo has made a millionaire out of 17 year-old app developer Nick D’Aloisio with the purchase of his news summary app, Summly – and although Raymond Snoddy says it’s great that news is being made more accessible via mobile devices – it’s a little less good that quality, journalistic content is being turned into convenient bullet points.
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Netflix has acquired vast amounts of data about its viewers’ watching habits – but can it really use this to predict what we want? Dominic Mills is not so sure.
Although we absorb more than one billion hours of the stuff in a single quarter, the dear old radio doesn’t get a look in most of the time. But it’s time to celebrate says Raymond Snoddy.
It’s not often that people earn praise before they have actually turned up for a new job. But Tony Hall, the BBC’s incoming director-general, has already played a blinder while still sitting in the Royal Opera House. By Raymond Snoddy.
The battle for a new form of press regulation was always likely to turn into a mess says Raymond Snoddy – and now it seems the newspaper industry has got a little tired of it all and decided that the Royal Charter is the best they can get; the political compromise that avoids overt statutory involvement.
As a term, big data is now a jargonistic cliché, says Dominic Mills. It’s over-used, mis-used and abused. It’s become the prerogative of people who peddle snake oil in the form of hugely expensive consultancy and software, luring in the suckers…and now marketers have got some major hurdles to overcome.
Although we must applaud the Lebedevs for trying to preserve iconic media institutions, the move to provide London with its own TV channel boils down to a couple of basic questions: can ‘London Live’ come up with something on a limited budget that will attract an audience – and will advertisers support the new venture? By Raymond Snoddy.
Given the price of Superbowl ads this year, you can hardly blame an advertiser for trying to maximise the bang/buck ratio by generating as much pre-game chatter as they can, says Dominic Mills. But is this making advertising strategies cynical as they compete to be talked about before kick off?
Sunday Times editor Martin Ivens has issued profound apologies and accepted the cartoon had “crossed a line” – but how do you account for such an instant change of heart? There can only be one explanation and it’s all down to Rupert Murdoch and his tweets.
Do you have any idea of the difference between something ‘overtly’ sexy and something ‘mildly’ sexy? It’s not easy, is it? My ‘mild’ might be your ‘overt’. So it’s both interesting and amusing that the ASA has knocked down complaints that M&S’s new lingerie ads were ‘overtly sexual, degrading to women and reinforced sexual stereotypes’.