ATKA SA | Why Facebook Home Doesn’t work

Since Facebook’s arrival as a public corporation, there have been various rumours of innovative products and hardware in the works, from the social media giant, that may help push their stock prices up.  

 

Earlier this year, we were introduced not only to an application called ‘Facebook Home’, but also a smartphone by HTC, the ‘HTC First’ that came with a built in Facebook Homeapplication.

 

The Facebook Home concept, only available on compatible Android based devices, integrates the user’s Facebook profile into the OS of the device itself, cutting out the need for a standalone Facebook application.

 

Photo and news feeds run in the background like a moving wallpaper while all messages, whether Facebook-based or not, are handled like the Facebook style inbox and notifications come through via the Facebook method for all applications.

 

To read the full article click here  http://goo.gl/jgyBBl

ATKA SA | SEO 101

SEO can seem like a major challenge to a new marketer. But do not despair – we are here to help! 

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and is the process of optimizing your website so that it can get good organic rankings and appear on the first page of Google.

The big thing to remember with SEO is that it’s all about keywords. Everything can be found on the internet using a keyword, whether it be images; websites; videos; items you’re shopping for or places you want to go – literally everything!

Keyword research is the process of discovering which keywords will work best for the product or service you’re selling. It is probably the most important step in setting your SEO-stage.

The SEO process can be divided into two groups – on-site SEO and off-site SEO.

On-site SEO:

1.Content

The search engines crawl your pages to see how well your content is written, if it is accurate and relevant to your keywords. Make sure the content on your website contains your keywords, but it’s important to still write your content for humans, so don’t stuff your page with keywords.

To read the full article click here  http://goo.gl/IqnUcJ

ATKA SA | What Does Windows 8 Mean For The PC

In recent years, Microsoft has come under fire for some of its questionable choices when it comes to Operating Systems.  

After its release in 2006, Windows Vista, the Windows OS that was unlucky enough to follow the massive success of Windows XP, was plagued with bugs, and quickly became the least liked OS of its time. Three years later, Windows 7 saw significant improvement, both to User Interface and performance.

A mere two years after that, in the midst of the smartphone and tablet revolution, Windows 8 defined it’s self as a touch interface based OS.

While this move towards integration between mobile and desktop computing could provide a useful shifting point towards a fully touch computing market, the popularity of smartphones and tablet PCs has not been enough to completely crush out the need for desktop computers, and with them, the need for peripherals and peripheral friendly Operating Systems.

To read the full article click here http://goo.gl/1LYKy2

Will Verified Accounts Save Facebook From Clone Profiles?

A recent spate of cloned profiles on Facebook has raised security issues with many users, this coming off the back of a number of different complaints against Facebook and other companies being used by the NSA to collect information.

Both ordinary individuals and popular personalities have claimed in recent months that information on their Facebook profiles was being duplicated to another account, which was then used to produce false information in their likeness.

Facebook’s response to this has been to introduce a profile verification system that will allow certain users to provide Facebook officials with the relevant information to allow them to indicate on their pages that they are, in fact, the real deal.

This is not a new idea, as social media rivals Twitter have used it for a number of years to verify the accounts of prominent celebrities and individuals in a number of fields.

Facebook’s use of this system doesn’t seem to be much different from Twitter’s, except for the fact that, for the moment, any attempt to have a profile verified must go through the Facebook help center.

To read the full article click here http://goo.gl/bihtgX

The Youth and Social Media

The youth (shall we say under 25), make up a large portion of active social media users are often the trend setters.

 

Where are the youth at the moment? What portion of social of the social media pie belongs to this segment and is there any marked trends in the movement of this group of people? Are they leaving Facebook? Where are they going?

 

 

Teens and Twitter

 

In Piper Jaffray’s 25th Semi-Annual teen research project, 30% of the 5000 teens interviewed named Twitter as their most important social network. The trends favour Twitter as it is keeps building its popularity. 

 

Compared to 2012, Twitter’s popularity has grown by 3% according to these votes, which are taken as a leading indicator of future trends. A recent poll amongst young Japanese social media users has showed that Twitter is their most popular social network by far, with many not even having tried Facebook. This is not surprising as Japan set a record with 25 088 tweets per second in 2011 during a television screening of a movie.

To read the full article click here http://goo.gl/sL4PT0

How Google Cards makes the Internet more personal

Simply put, Google has been the leading Internet search engine for pretty much its entire life. 

 

It has become such an integral part of our lives that we now refer to the act of looking for a bit of information online as “Googling”. 

 

In recent years, there has been a lot of talk of innovation in the online world, from personalized search engines to adaptive results that learn your behavior and give you the results you are more likely to pick out first. Google has been at the forefront of all of these innovations.

 

In 2012, Google’s innovation struck a new level of personalization that went by pretty unnoticed at first, but through updates and additions, has become one of the major selling points that the company has to offer, both in the mobile and desktop search arenas.

 

Google Cards is a simplistic innovation by Google that has taken what Google does best – searching the Internet – and combined it with the idea that people now expect to be told what they want to know before they even ask. 

 

Imagine, for example, you are on your way to the airport, but you are stuck in traffic on the way there. You wouldn't have time to go to your airline’s website or to sit on hold for 20 minutes to find the status of your flight. If Google knows that you are supposed to be flying at a certain time on a certain day (through integration with Gmail) it can give you a little index card in your Google Search app on your smartphone (and all indications point to the Cards being available on Chrome in the near future too) showing you the details of your flight, the traffic level on the way to the airport, as well as any recommended routes, times and conditions relevant to your journey.

To read the full article click here  http://goo.gl/xauDSo

6 marketing revolutions in 2013

The digital media race is on. Some of the biggest companies in the world have spent the last few years honing their products in efforts to outsell their competitors, and as a result, the consumers have gotten much more than they could have asked for. Because of the developments in every area of communication, whether digital or analog, has drastically improved, and most significantly in the last 18 months. 

 

The following is a list of 6 of the most notable trends in marketing and communication that have been developed or more widely applied, or will become commonplace within the next cycle of product releases.

 

1. The digital wallet

Google has called it the Google Wallet; Apple uses Passbook. The idea behind the digital wallet is that we will no longer need to keep all kinds of identification, credit or debit cards, gift cards, plane tickets or loyalty cards with us at all times to get by. By simply syncing your smartphone with your bank account, adding the relevant application from Starbucks or participating airlines, this technology will allow you to pay for (almost) anything you buy by simply scanning or using the NFC (Near field communication) chip in your smartphone to communicate with purchase points, keeping every valuable card or access detail you need in one place so that you don’t have to worry about any of it. While this technology is still in development, it shows promise for the future.

 

 

2. The emergence of big data management

 

IBM studies have shown that 3 quintillion (that is 3 followed by 18 zeros) bytes of data are produced every day. As this number increases rapidly, we will need to find more effective ways of storing the data – more effective than hard drives and ordinary servers that we have traditionally used.

 

Cloud computing is a step in the right direction, giving us access to storage space without bulking up our offices or work spaces at arguably cheaper prices. This kind of storage is also more reliable over a longer period of time (when was the last time you spilt coffee on your iCloud account?), and gives us much more effective ways of reassessing the data we have. As time goes on, we will be able to use stored data to understand competitors, customer habits and the markets in a much shorter time than we have been able to before.

To read the full article click here http://goo.gl/zp39Pc