Instagram is rumoured to be rolling out long-form video in what could be a play by Facebook to poach a growing portion of ad spend from YouTube, owned by arch-rival in ad tech Google.

While Instagram currently supports hour-long live streams, videos are capped at just 60 seconds, but unnamed sources speaking to WSJ say this could be extended to 60 minutes, which could make the photo-sharing platform a whole lot more attractive to influencers.

The news comes despite Instagram already becoming the dominant force of...

With three hours a day on average worldwide spent in apps, it’s no wonder that our smartphones have become intrinsic to our everyday lives. With the multitude of apps available, our smartphones are overwhelmingly personal – glancing at a few pages of someone’s chosen apps provides a uniquely intimate snapshot into their daily life and personal interests. From mobile banking and retail shopping apps, to Google docs, social messaging and publisher apps, our smartphone is the primary platform...

mCommerce - the digital trend that retailers cannot afford to ignore with over 25% of the world’s population (1.6 billion) using their mobile devices to make purchases. It’s certainly not replacing ecommerce, but a larger proportion of online sales are now coming from mobile devices with recent trends show that online shopping via a desktop and laptop has decreased by 15% in 2018, compared to smartphone transactions, which have doubled.

Mobile commerce is an advancement of ecommerce but through...

Last year we saw AIM sunsetted, the wildly popular instant messaging service used by tweens, teens and everyone else with a dial-up or DSL connection during the 90s and early 2000s. AIM eventually faded as SMS showed up in our lives and that has since been supplanted by messaging apps.

At its very core, these services have served as easy, expressive and cheap communication tools-an extension and progression from...

New research by Verve has shown that consumers are twice as likely to engage with mobile ads that utilise location data then they would with generic ads.

The company surveyed 2,000 UK adults also found that mobile ads related to user hobbies and interests perform much better than generic mobile ads. Of those surveyed who have engaged with mobile ads, 33% said they would engage with one that was related to something or somewhere they planned for the future.

The rewards are clearly there for marketers who make...

Ads can be annoying, especially on mobile. But, according to research IAB UK the main source of annoyance for consumers using mobile is not the ads themselves, but the fact that a lot of them aren’t optimised for the format.

12,000 UK adults were asked about their feelings towards mobile advertising, and the vast majority of them are in favour of ads in order to keep online content free. 84% prefer ads to paying for an ad-free experience.

“A sustainable future is about making the experience work...

A switch to the smaller screen

It’s no secret that games consoles dating as far back as the Sega Mega Drive and Nintendo SNES have enjoyed pride of place in living rooms around the world, providing a welcome dose of entertainment and a brief escape from reality.

But, thanks to incredible advances in mobile technology – just look at the iPhone X and Google Pixel 2 – gaming on the small screen in your pocket is giving the latest consoles a run for their money. And that means big opportunities...

As would be expected of an event where it takes a solid 40 minutes to walk from one end to the other, there is a lot going on at this years Mobile World Congress (MWC).

Taking place in an uncharacteristically grey and gloomy Barcelona, this year’s event featured all the big players in the smartphone market.

Here is a rundown of all the major smartphone-related announcements so far on day 2.

Samsung

Samsung used MWC 2018 to showcase the latest version of its flagship Galaxy line of phones  in a big (and widely

Mobile first design is not a new concept.

It has been around for more than a decade and it’s used to refer to the strategy of designing and developing digital experiences for mobile devices at the very start of a project; rather than the traditional approach of first designing for desktop and consequently for mobile.

However, the term is possibly more relevant in the business world today than ever before.

As the information we consume online reaches us faster, wherever we are and as the growing use of...

Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) was initiated as a project to improve the performance of mobile web pages. The project has so far mostly focused on making loading and rendering for existing text-heavy articles such as those found on news sites or cooking blogs.

The company is now looking to extend the project beyond this with the launch of the AMP story format.

On mobile, users tend to browse a lot of articles, but only engage with a few in-depth. This is because the majority of articles on the...