The Internet Access – Households and Individuals report reveals that 6 million more people used their mobile phone to access the internet in 2011 than in 2010, with the use of wireless hotspots increasing to 4.9 million people using them in 2011 from 0.7 million in 2007. Increase in mobile use through phones is reported as notable across all age groups, but 16-24 year olds demonstrate the fastest growth, with mobile internet usage increasing from 44% to 71% within the year.

As for what people get up to online – 60% of female and 54% of male internet users participate in social networking, though men are more likely to use professional networking sites such as LinkedIn. 66% of all adults purchased goods or services over the internet – an impressive increase of 62% from 2010.

However, as internet activity increases so too do fears over data safety – around one in five internet users feel their skills aren’t sufficient to protect their personal data or prevent a virus.

It’s a revolutionary iPhone and Android app that gives you the opportunity to develop your ideas into your own mobile phone apps and bring them to market – and therefore, potentially to make your fortune.

It’s free to download and allows users to submit app ideas and – if successful – potentially see it created, developed and marketed with full investor backing. The app has been featured on Guardian – Consumer App of the Week and BBC Radio 2 recently.

Individuals whose apps are successfully developed and launched will earn 25% on all profit earned plus an initial £250 as a thank you. In the case of Angry Birds, one of the most successful apps ever, that would mean netting over £9 million to date!

Highly respected businessman & Daily Internet Chairman, Michael Edelson joins the management team as a non-executive chairman.

Michael said: “This is one of the most exciting and innovative projects I’ve been involved with during my career. FundedApps will help to unlock fantastic ideas that might otherwise never come to fruition. It will also enable the team to monitor and map emerging consumer trends, staying one step ahead in an extremely exciting market that is constantly evolving.”

How To Submit An App Idea

- Download FundedApps Apple App
- Download FundedApps Android App
- Visit FundedApps Website

Anecdotal evidence suggests it’s far from uncommon for hiring companies to Google prospective employees’ names, and this week the New York Times reports on a US service that scrapes the web for information on what prospective employees have said and done online in the past few years. Most people aren’t going to pepper the internet with handily tagged pictures of them proudly showing off a greenhouse full of plants that may be of interest to the local constabulary, but do we really consider how far the snaps of our drunken nights out or our ranty tweets and forum posts about colleagues might spread? If you were recruiting and found photographic evidence of illegal activity or a string of invective directed at a candidate’s boss, colleagues, current project and, well, just work in general, would it make you think twice about a CV that had looked promising?

As employers become increasingly savvy, ‘never put anything online that you wouldn’t want your mum or your boss to see’ isn’t a bad maxim to live by. Of course, I know a fair few people that have pseudonyms for things they’d prefer their mum/boss not to see – but it’s important to be aware that anonymity can’t really be guaranteed. Step forward Dooce, Petite Anglaise, Belle de Jour and a host of other successful bloggers who’ve been found out by their employers or outed by the media – and that’s just the high profile cases. I know of a case where someone’s mother in law discovered the blog on which she’d been vented about. You can imagine the family fallout.

There is, though, a positive side to the social media and recruitment issue as well. LinkedIn is an incredible resource for professional networking, but we’ve also hired an agency as a result of contact initially made through Twitter – and we’re not the only ones.

Twitter is, if you use it properly, a great place for networking. I’ve seen connections form that have resulted in fantastic freelance work and full-time contracts for people’s ideal jobs. I’ve seen people quit their day jobs and go freelance with enormous help from the connections they’ve established via Twitter and their blogs. That’s not to say that it will happen for everyone, but social media allows for the establishment of very immediate, very direct connections with influential people and that means there are phenomenal opportunities out there if you put the effort into grabbing them – and make sure you’re savvy about how you present yourself online.

The move is a massive shake-up for the domain name system. Under the new system, it will be possible for domain names to end in almost any word in any language. It’s designed to appeal primarily to big business, which has both pockets deep enough and reasons good enough to apply for the creation of private gTLDs – .hsbc or .coke, perhaps?

It isn’t, though, going to be possible for everyone to reap the potential rewards of branding the internet in this way. Interested parties will need to complete an application process that will involve digesting a 360 page application guidebook and, crucially, stumping up at least $185,000 – possibly more if there are competing applications for the same TLD and an auction is required. So, while the global corporations are likely to be able to brand their own corner of the internet, small businesses will have to stick to good old .com and .co.uk.

The application process is expected to begin during January 2012.

The idea behind it is to prerender the top search result in the background, so that when you do click the link the page loads immediately. Google says it will prerender pages when they’re confidant you’ll click the link, based on their relevance technology, and they expect the new development to shave between two and five seconds off typical searches

What do you think? Is this a great idea or are you happy to wait a few seconds to load your page of choice?

To use Google Instant at the moment, you’ll need to either try the developer version or wait for the next beta release of Chrome – for more information, take a look at Google’s post on Instant Pages.

Yes, Twitter. With iOS5, Apple are integrating support for the social media site so deeply into their system that if you put your Twitter login details into your iPhone or iPad settings you’ll be able to tweet directly from applications like Safari and Camera.

In making the distance from ‘I should tweet that’ to tweet even shorter, Apple are really taking note of how their customers are already using Twitter, generating yet another one of those ‘oh, cool!’ moments they’re so good at inducing in their customer base (we promise to spare you photo tweets of everything in Daily HQ if you follow us, though!) – though what Twitter app developers will make of it is perhaps a different matter.

As for cloud technology – well, step forward iCloud! In the words of Mr Steve Jobs:

“We are going to demote the PC to just be a device. We are going to move the digital hub, the centre of your digital life, into the cloud.”

Contacts, calendar and mail applications will all operate in such a way that a change made via one device with propagate across your other devices, making cross-device synchronisation much less of a hassle. Apple are also extending this logic to photos and, interestingly, music. iTunes will acquire a (paid) iMatch element with the ability to scan tracks people have ripped from their own CDs and replicate them in the iCloud library without the user having to upload the tracks. Clever stuff for the music fan on the move!

It’s not just all about clever tricks, though. Apple are being canny as ever and pitch-perfect in their judgment of the way their consumers use tech. Smartphones and tablets have untethered us from our PCs (and, indeed, Macs!) for web browsing, music playing, app use and so on – but we’re still largely stuck with plugging into them to sync our music libraries between devices. And, well, I know plenty of people that have lost work or meaningful photos because most of us don’t back these things up as often as we should and so we lose them when a hard drive dies. Storing things that are important – whether for work or for sentimental value – in a cloud environment online makes so much sense. Once they’re stored, securely, online you can access them from multiple devices rather than being reliant on just one particular piece of hardware. That’s why our DailyDrive online storage product is so popular, after all!

Now, roll on Autumn for that potential new iPhone…

We aimed to encourage often reluctant bricks and mortar shops to extend their businesses to include an online sales element because, well, we wanted their business, of course, but we could see how important a sales channel the internet would become for almost every type of business.

It’s a relatively low cost channel (a couple of quid per year for the domain name plus a few more per month for online shop design and administration software plus hosting), we said – and still say! – that adds a whole extra potential market to existing bricks and mortar shops and provides an entry to trading for new traders who find they’re brimming more with ideas than capital.

It sounds smug to say it, but, well, look how right we were! The Guardian reports today that Monday 29th November (known as Manic Monday, presumably so web content editors across the country find themselves humming that Bangles song) is predicted to be the busiest internet shopping day of the year, with a massive £537m being spent online as the UK’s consumers prepare for the festive season.

Though the bulk of seasonal spending remains on the high street, online sales continue to grow and will make up 17p for every pound spent during the festive season. Following on from the Guardian’s reports earlier in the month that UK is punching above its weight when it comes to eCommerce, this is fantastic news indeed for online traders.

There is, too, a very real business value in social media that it’s tremendously short sighted to ignore. And it’s a growing area. According to  a recent Hitwise report, the proportion of traffic sent by social media (like Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, forums, blogs etc) to online retail sites has increased by 13% in the last year and in September 2010 social media accounted for 11.5% of all UK visits to websites. Those numbers demonstrate that social media is an incredibly fast-growing area with great potential to push customers to your website.

Why do people follow companies on social media sites?

The report notes that the top reasons for people to follow companies on social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook are to find out about special offers and to hear other users’ experiences. So, if your company’s Twitter and Facebook sites encourage discussion and provide financial value, the chances are users will keep coming back. And due to the nature of social media sites, there’s a good chance they’ll also recommend you to their contacts – every time someone ‘likes’ your Facebook page, for example, all their Facebook friends will see it and that helps spread the word and build your follower base.

OK, but I’m a business – how do I make money from social media?

Well, as the report puts it, ‘The ‘social’ aspect of social networks is extremely important.’ You can’t just blat out straplines and sales messages 100% of the time and expect revenue to ensue – if people want broadcast media they’ll switch on the tv. This is about connecting, about your customers feeling as though you’re on the same wavelength as them and will provide them with interesting and useful information and, if they need it, help and advice.

It’s an old adage, but it’s true – people buy from people. Some of the most frequent praise we get is for the quality of our technical support because it’s all done by experts who know what it’s like to be on the receiving end of a script and have no intention of putting our customers through all that ‘press one if your query is regarding billing, press two if…’ malarky. And it’s appreciated – our customers love that if they have a problem they can get straight through to an actual human being, explain their issue and get intelligent, active support rather than someone trying to run them through script questions one to six each time they call. Extrapolate that idea to social media – if your channel is all robotic retweets and sell, sell, sell with no interaction or intelligent advice, what’s in it for your customers?

To get the best from social media, you need to talk about things that your potential customer base find interesting, provide advice on things in which you’re an expert, offer them something of value (whether it’s discounts, advance notice of events, coverage of London Fashion Week or articles about SEO) and most importantly, engage with them. If your customers ask you something on Twitter, answer it! If you see a reference to yourself, join the conversation. If someone praises your services, say thank you. If you want to know what your customers think about something – ask them. The more people engage with your business, the more likely they are to buy and to stay loyal because there’s value in it for them to stick around.

More information

For more detailed information about the social media marketplace, download your copy of the report from the Hitwise website.

Oh, and you can find us on Twitter here (we’re working on snazzing up our Facebook page, adding videos and getting some interesting discussions going amongst our customers in the future, but you can find that here in the meantime – and if there’s something you’d like to see, tell us!). Come and chat to us!

A recent report announces that the internet as a whole is worth £100 billion to the UK economy, according to the Guardian, with much of that driven by online sales. Measured by the amount spent per capita, the UK has the biggest e-commerce market in the world and we also have the largest online advertising market outside of the United States.

Not only is our online retail industry thriving, it’s also expected to grow considerably over the next few years, in part through increased focus from the government on improving broadband penetration.

With such willing consumers and a digital economy that’s set to continue to grow, now’s a great time to focus on getting an online shop set up. Got a brilliant idea for a shop? Invest in an eShop and make it happen. Maybe you already have a bricks and mortar shop? An eShop doesn’t cost the earth (they start at £8.99 per month!) and once you’ve got it set up (keep an eye on our current Getting To Know eShop series for hints and tips) you’ve opened up your potential customer base to cover a much broader area than you can reach with footfall alone. We even throw in Google AdWords vouchers so you can start to get your name out there and grab your piece of that online advertising market, too.

You need to be logged in to a Google account to see it, but if you are, you’ll see that results now start to complete before you’ve even finished typing your query. Google uses what you’ve typed so far, combined with where you are and what you’ve searched for previously, to predict what query you’re trying to make and returns search results accordingly. These results will likely change as you finish typing your search term. The aim is to make it much faster to find the information you’re after by delivering the answer Google thinks you need before you’ve even finished asking the question – Google predicts that Instant will shave between two and five seconds off the average search query.

If search results – both paid and natural – are being returned before a query is even completed, though, what impact will that have on your pay-per-click advertising (PPC) and search engine optimisation (SEO) efforts?

For PPC, let’s take it straight from the horse’s mouth. Google says that ad impressions will be counted in these circumstances:

• The user begins to type a query on Google and clicks anywhere on the page (a search result, an ad, a spell correction, a related search).
• The user chooses a particular query by clicking the Search button, pressing Enter, or selecting one of the predicted queries.
• The user stops typing, and the results are displayed for a minimum of three seconds.

So, their thinking seems to be that impressions will still only be counted if there’s a reasonable chance that the person performing the search could be interested in your ad. Great!

At this stage, it’s too early to predict exactly what sort of effect the new system will have on your PPC campaign as a whole. Google’s expressed hope is that things will improve for you as Google Instant “helps people search using terms that more directly connect them with the answers they need”, but the best course of action is to continue to monitor your pay-per-click advertising campaign closely and adjust if necessary.

SEO can be a trickier beast to predict. Google Instant may make it more challenging for SEO experts to use search engine results pages (SERPs) to inform their activities, but at the moment, it’s not thought within the industry that Instant will have a tremendous impact on what you should actually do from the point of view of optimising your website. If you need a refresher course on SEO best practice, take a look at our Bibliography of SEO Resources and our  SEO Tips blog series.

So, for now, it’s carry on as you were but keep a close eye on your campaigns (we hope you do that anyway, of course!). We’ll keep you updated if we find Google Instant has really changed the landscape.