Saving Facebook for the people

Has Facebook become such a critical and integral part of so many lives that it should be taken out of the control of the private and corporate worlds and become ‘nationalized’? That’s the view of one eminent academic who feels it is behaving badly as a company, has...

Marketing, as we knew it, is dead!

“Traditional marketing — including advertising, public relations, branding and corporate communications — is dead. Many people in traditional marketing roles and organizations may not realize they’re operating within a dead paradigm. But they are. The evidence is...

Virtual reality looming

Who, in their right mind would want to be a virtual network operator or VNO? Plenty it seems, and despite the chequered history of VNOs, particularly the mobile type (MVNOs) more are lining up, for a variety of reasons, to have a go. The most popular form of VNO seems...

Sombre summer sets scene for silly season

Maybe it’s because of summer holidays in the Northern Hemisphere, but there seems to be a common malaise among the bigger digital service providers (DSPs) just now. Is it that they are just clearing the decks of bad news before the silly season starts in September,...

Monetizing mobile NOTT that easy

When Facebook reported net losses of $157 million in its first quarter trading as a public company, it placed some of the blame on the under-performance of its mobile services and promised to introduce a new and improved mobile social networking experience. Google’s...