M-use

A Volkskrant journalist aims herself now fulltime on taking part in the online conversations and investigates on sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Hyves and LinkedIn.

Editor van Lier starts this year (the 1st of June) as social media editor of the Volkskrant. It the first time is that a Dutch medium invented a function like this within the company, according to Van Lier. Large international mediums such as BBC and CNN have already that type of experts in the field of social sites. Van Lier starts officially on 1 June. The elections are the first subject where she is going to focus on.

Many mediums post a lot of articles around at social network sites, but are not there under its own title in conversation with readers. They especially post direct links with news posts. Van Lier will ensure that Twitter and the Facebook page of the newspaper become more than only a long list left to new article, as it currently is. She only tells a particular article of the day will be selected to share on Twitter and Facebook. Also she will investigate several social network sites to news and reactions to bulletins from readers.

Volkskrant journalists must do act on social sites according to its especially something with their specialisms. Van Lier: ' If you do not follow Lance Armstrong on Twitter as a cycling journalist, you must be ashamed of yourself. He tells on Twitter more than by means of the mediums and oficial channels.'

The Volkskrant recovered its name on Twitter some months suffered of the person who had him earlier already claimed. The Hyves page of Volkskrant is not yet in possession of the national newspaper. Again it seems that social media are getting more and more important these days.

Music service Spotify offers three options in the Netherlands:
* Free version (with publicity)
* Unlimited (without publicity)
* Premium (without publicity and some extras)

The streaming music software Spotify has started Tuesday in the Netherlands and offers now a something new than men was used to be. There is choice from three options. Spotify Open is a free version with publicities, banners and audio messages between numbers. Free users in the Netherlands have a maximum of 20 hours per month good for about 300 songs according to Spotify. Spotify Open replaces the old Spotify Free, which did not have that limit.

Spotify Unlimited is an option where users can listen an unlimited amount of music on their computer in exchange for 5 euros each month. Spotify Premium cost 10 euro per month and offers also offline listen to its own playlists and has mobile access. The audio quality of premium is also better: 320 kbps instead of 160 kbps in the Unlimited version. Payment will happen by creditcard or Paypal. It is not able to pay with iDeal, the most common matter of payment in the Netherlands.

To celebrate the launching in the Netherlands Spotify offers exclusively access to the single 'Schouder aan schouder' of Guus Meeuwis and Marco Borsato. Users of Spotify are able to listen to the track already, while the official release is just this Friday.

Tuesday also appeared a Spotify-app in the Dutch App Store and the Android Market. There is also Symbian-client for Nokia-users. The new version of Spotify has also several social functions. Now it's possible to connect you Facebookfriends and you can share you songs on Twitter or Facebook. Besides Spotify's own music the program is also able to play users own music directly from your computer. Instaed you would like to save a song on to your harddisk Spotify sends you to de Buy-button from the downloadwebsite 7Digital.


Some additional features
* Mosaic images for playlists: the artwork from the first nine tracks in a playlist will create a cool mosaic image for your playlist
* New toolbar in headers: Sharing music to Facebook/Twitter and your friends is much simpler. Easy to subscribe or unsubscribe to a playlist as well as view information about how popular a playlist is.
* A share icon in ‘Now playing’ artwork: makes sharing what you’re currently listening to much easier.
* Automatic track replacement: Spotify will now automatically try to find a replacement for any track you can’t play. So if a friend in another country sends you a playlist with tracks you can’t play or a local file, we’ll search our catalogue and link to a playable track when possible. A ‘link’ icon next to the track name represents replaced tracks.

If you’ve ever wondered how much energy it takes to keep the world updated about your goings-on, look no further than TweetCalories, a new web app that shows you approximately how many calories you’ve burned over the last 24 hours by tweeting.

The application works by assuming several factors. For example, it’s figured that the average word length in a tweet is about 6 characters. It assumes the average user’s typing speed is 60 words per minute, that the user is of an average or healthy weight and normally burns around 2.65 calories per minute, and that it takes around 23 seconds to write and send a tweet of 140 characters. Based on these figures, the app’s creators have determined that sending a tweet burns around 1.03 calories.

Here, you can see the difference between calories burned by a more frequent tweeter versus one who tweets less often:




Sadly, there’s no ability to calculate the difference between tweeting while mobile versus tweeting from the web. But although we are sure that updating one stream while on-the-go burns more calories, we don’t advocate the Twitter habit as a necessarily healthful lifestyle choice remember, you burn calories while you’re sleeping, too, but no one ever called sleeping a good form of exercise.

TweetCalories was constructed as a clever bit of marketing by gargantuan ad agency Grupo ABC for a Brazilian gym, Companhia Athletica. What do you think about this social media marketing attempt: Does it hit or miss?

Market value, is that something like temperature?

With regard to stock exchange index it can be not yet up to that point, but if it comes to brand value Apple (nr 6 in 2009) has already outdistanced Microsoft (nr 2 in 2009). The brand value of Apple increased according to a study of Millward Brown last year with 32% up to 83.15 billion dollar. Hereby Apple is world’s second most valuable brand.

Only Google (114 billion dollar) and IBM (86) are brands which are more valuable. The rest of the top ten is completed by Microsoft, Coca-Cola, McDonald' s, Marlboro, China Mobile, General Electric and Vodafone. The most valuable Dutch brand is Shell. Shell represents the fortieth place with a brand value of 15 billion dollar. Philips and Heineken are two remarkable Dutch absentees in the top 100.

For this study each year one million consumers annually are questioned. Although it seems a rather fair overview. How this list with valuable brands is in the proportion to the annual overview of InterBrand and Business Week? There stands Coca-Cola for years at the top position.

Also interesting, according to the study of Millward Brown, Marlboro has a brand value of 57 billion dollar. Perhaps that someone could inform the shareholders of Marlboro (the Altria Group still better known as Philip Morris). That company currently has a grant index of 44 billion dollar.

The iPad is really starting to become an hype. Last week Apple reported to have sold over 1 million of them which was twice as fast as the iPhone. But it is going crazier. The Ipad was built into cars , and ofcourse the device was used a lot in house, but Alan Daly thought is was cool to mount one inside his kitchen counter.

The headphone jack funnels sound into a MIDI system for audio output duties, and apps with cooking books, shopping lists turn your kitchen cabinet into a modern day recipe book.

Check out the video of the installation below and let us know what you think. Are you be interested in an iPad kitchen centerpiece? Where will we see Apple’s magical device pop up next?