The Wild West of online ads By Louis Eksteen The humble banner ad originated at Wired magazine when its creator started using this advertising unit on the then-influential magazine's website (HotWired) in October 1994. I remember HotWired well, as I was busy researching the early origins of the web for a varsity project. This was a time [...]
Automated investment advice gains traction By Louis Eksteen At Twisted Toast we are proud to be the technology provider to SmartRand™, South Africa's first automated investment advice product, commonly know as a robo adviser. Since creating SmartRand as a stand-alone product, we have enhanced the technology with our partners Galileo Capital to now be able to [...]
Creativity is scarce; use it well By Louis Eksteen One of my favourite writers is the Czechoslovakian great Milan Kundera. His quote that “business has only two functions - marketing and innovation,” for me means he values creativity as an essential part of business, because both marketing and innovation require original thinking of a creative kind. (Kundera [...]
Don’t think the digital world always delivers By Louis Eksteen Just because the internet and its myriad machinations mostly work, it doesn’t mean it always does. Websites aren’t always available, email isn’t always received, passwords aren’t always safe, things aren’t always what they seem to be on the internet and the cloud... well, the cloud isn’t really [...]
The road to our destiny By Louis Eksteen Kim and I are sitting down for breakfast at a fabulous foody retreat hotel in the Drakensberg during one of the legendary UpperCase Media management conferences/jols. During the session the day before we were introduced to this new thing, a kind of chat app with place for only [...]
Chat app monetisation around the corner By Louis Eksteen With Snap Inc’s successful listing on the New York Stock Exchange yesterday comes renewed interest in the rise of the chat app. The owner of the popular chat app Snapchat saw its share price rise a phenomenal 44% during its first day of trading. Now the attention of [...]
The instagramification of social media By Louis Eksteen I love Instagram. Its instant filtering makes anyone a moody photog type. It’s now also clear, in hindsight, that Facebook made the deal of the century when they bought this hip app for only $1bn. The way in which the social network is monetising Instagram is simply brilliant. [...]
The times they have changed By Louis Eksteen I follow a variety of Bob Dylan-inspired social media feeds. (Instagram is proving to be a treasure chest of rare and previously unseen pictures and videos.) As it is in these days of news-snippet overload, I can’t clearly remember where I saw it (reckon it must have been [...]
Email might be winning against spam By Louis Eksteen Email remains the number one business communication tool by a country mile. While chat apps have become hugely popular, even overtaking traditional social media in usage levels, good old email still rules. In the Radicati Group’s Email Statistics Report, 2016-2020, this sentence from the executive summary is telling: “Email use [...]
Think before you post By Louis Eksteen The ridiculousness that is the American presidential race highlights, again, how social media as a universal platform for self-expression can change otherwise intelligent people into bumbling idiots. The latest spat between the president of Mexico and the Donald shows that who’ll pay for a wall – that will never be [...]
