Weekly Comms News Round Up 10/10/2013
My weekly pick of comms news is back after a short break. This week’s selection includes details of Twitter’s IPO decision as well as its rumoured breaking news service and Microsoft hacker being awarded $100,000. All stories are curated via @CisionUK.
British hacker wins $100,000 bounty from Microsoft via The Telegraph
A British hacking expert has been awarded $100,000 (£628,000) by Microsoft after finding loopholes in the company’s security that left it open to attack.
James Forshaw picked up the prize after hacking into the company’s operating system in such a way that would potentially compromise all software running on Microsoft platforms. The glitches found were so serious that Microsoft will not reveal the specifics of the hack until all their software has been updated.
Twitter Appears To Be Exploring Personalized Breaking News Notifications With @EventParrot Experiment by @panzer via TechCrunch
Twitter appears to be exploring introducing breaking news notifications tuned for you to its apps, if a new experimental account is any indication. An account called @eventparrot has garnered around 1,500 followers and promises to deliver ‘direct messages that help you keep up with what’s happening in the world’.
Twitter’s Data Business Proves Lucrative by @lizzadwoskin via TheWall Street Journal
In its IPO filing Thursday, Twitter Inc. disclosed how much the microblogging platform earned from a lesser-known side business: $47.5 million came from selling off its data to a fast-growing group of companies that analyse the data for insights into news events and trends.
That is a small amount compared with the revenue generated from advertising, but Twitter’s data business has rippled across the economy. The site’s constant stream of experiences, opinions and sentiments has spawned a vast commercial ecosystem, serving up putative insights to product developers, Hollywood studios, major retailers and—potentially most profitably—hedge funds and other investors. Backed by millions of dollars in venture capital, hundreds of “social listening” firms have emerged.
Fight club! Instagram’s 15 second video vs. Vine’s 6 seconds by @ChristopherRTWSvia Econsultancy
It has often been said in filmic terms that if a story can’t be told in 90 minutes than it’s not worth telling. Try telling that to The Godfather.
However this certainly rings true on some level, especially in advertising where you’re engaging with a customer or selling a product rather than telling a sprawling, expansive story of gun violence and enemy disposal. Who does benefit from the longer format? For a customer it’s good to keep things brief, nobody needs to sit through another colossal Thomson marathon, but conversely six second Vines may seem too short for the purpose.
The BBC announces BBC Store, letting you pay to download and keep shows by @psawers via The Next Web
‘BBC Store’ will be a commercial, online service, letting UK users buy TV shows to keep forever. So we’re talking permanent downloads here.Hall didn’t reveal how much this will cost, whether it will be per-download or a monthly subscription, but details will be revealed on this in due course.
“We’re moving from being catch-up TV, to online TV,” said Hall. “Next year, we’re going to reinvent iPlayer.”This has been rumored previously, and will likely cause more than a little controversy, with license-fee payers arguing that their annual fee already covers the cost of the programmes, therefore why should they have to pay again to keep them permanently?
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