Is Viddy the new Twitter of mobile social video?

‘If you don’t have an iPhone, well…you don’t have an iPhone’, the Apple iPhone 4 ad mocks. You can’t argue with that. Yet with smartphone ownership now so prevalent (100 million iPhones have now been sold globally), it’s not apparent who the slightly smug voiceover is actually talking to.

But how many smartphone owners are using their devices to share viral video? If stats about Viddy are anything to go by, the correct answer is ‘a growing number’.

Viddy, a social video app that allows people to apply filters and effects to short video clips shot on their iPhones, is doing rather well. Just six weeks after launching it boasts 500,000 downloads – a fairly major milestone to hit within such a short timeframe.

If social video sharing in the mobile space really does catch on, the potential to get up close and personal through viral is pretty thrilling.

Take hipster rockers Panic at the Disco as an example. The band recently asked fans to download Viddy to help create the video for its new single, “Ready to Go”. More »

Inflated snow reports flattened by iphone

BBC news has really been cranking up the snow news today, live reports from every inch of the country, stories of road ‘misery’ and ‘a few hardy souls’ venturing out on the high street to get their shopping (while someone walks past quite normally with a hat on).

While they fluff up the snow reports here, proof that ski resorts have actually been inflating their snow levels has emerged in the US. A Dartmouth College study ‘Wintertime for Deceptive Advertising’ has found that while resorts routinely report 23% deeper snow at weekends, US government weather research show there is no such pattern.

Suspicions of opportunism grow when it’s revealed that it’s the ski resorts without money back guarantees but with local customers that are the worst offenders, rather than resorts whose customers fly in and take a punt on there being lots of the fluffy stuff about. More »

paying by iphone for your Starbucks sir?

In their latest marketing offensive against dwindling sales, Starbucks has announced an iphone application with a barcode feature enabling iphone owning coffee fans to pay with their handset.

It won’t make much impact in the UK just yet as it’s on trial at just 16 stores in Seattle and Silicon Valley, but boy the headlines, 93 stories on UK Google already. This begs the question, should the money for iphone app development really come out of the PR budget?

Such is media interest in iphone applications and Twitter, More »