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 [...]
Things that work may not be perfect By Louis Eksteen A friend advised me the other day not take the unnecessary risk of trying to make something that’s working well, perfect. He explained that too often one tries to get something that’s working well already to a perfect state, just to break the whole thing in [...]
Dropbox is setting you infinitely free By Louis Eksteen At The Toast we use Dropbox all the time. It’s an amazing feat of tech wizardry in the connected age that lets you save, share and retrieve any file anywhere. Its sync feature that can seamlessly keep your local computer files up to date with your cloud (internet) files [...]
How the humble library search gave birth to Google By Louis Eksteen A friend’s son in grade nine recently received career guidance counselling at school. After completing a battery of aptitude and other tests, he was provided with a list of career options to consider. He is a gifted scholar of mathematics, so the first few [...]
Internet security woes By Louis Eksteen As web developers, we are often asked by clients if internet security exists. Our answer is no. All websites are at risk of being attacked, hacked, compromised or in some or other way interfered with by the dark masters of the web. This happens everywhere, all the time. If you cannot [...]
Why Facebook trumps Twitter By Louis Eksteen The social media scene in 2016 is shaping up to be very different to the recent past. Apart from Facebook not putting a foot wrong, Snapchat seems poised for significant monetisation, with influential advertising decision makers calling this innovative messaging service the one to watch this year. Many large brands [...]
