The Digital Business Week
The past week’s top business and technology news stories
Now 2m Facebook accounts in Ireland – 44pc of population
There are now 2,014,000 Facebook accounts active in Ireland, which means that 44pc of Ireland’s 4.5m population is on Facebook. A new info-graphic provided by Edelman highlights Facebook grew by more than double in the past two years.
In terms of demographics, there are 1,052,840 women on Facebook compared with 921,840 men. Interestingly 39,000 Facebook users in Ireland don’t wish to disclose their gender.
18-34 year-olds make up more than half of social networking giant Facebook’s Irish users. Not surprisingly Dublin has the largest Facebook population with in excess of 780,000 users.
Leading brands on Facebook in Ireland include Bailey’s, Guinness, Jameson, Penneys, Oxegen, Tayto, Tourism Ireland, Captain Morgan’s, Ben & Jerry’s and Ryanair.
See the info-graphic by clicking here
Google TV gets set to launch in the UK
Google is planning to launch Google TV in the UK. The service will be launched by chairman Eric Schmidt who will be outlining Google’s TV plans at the Edinburgh International Television Festival.
At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier this year it was clear that digital TV fuelled by internet video services and social media apps were the order of the day.
The new set top box will enable viewers to watch catch-up TV services such as the BBC’s iPlayer and the ITV Player through the set top box.
RIM reveals BBM Music cloud service
BlackBerry maker Research in Motion (RIM) has taken the wraps off its much anticipated BBM Music service which it no doubt intends to tap into the massive popularity of its BlackBerry Messaging (BBM) platform.
The company describes BBM Music as an easy-to-use cloud-based service that enables social and viral music discovery by allowing users to build an evolving, community-based music library that is shared amongst their BBM Music friends.
The idea is that the size of the music library will continue to grow as new friends join the community and each user can select music from a catalogue with millions of songs from leading music companies – Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group and EMI.
Facebook’s new privacy changes bring the battle to Google+
Facebook has announced a slew of changes that it says make it easier for users to have greater control over how they share posts, photos, tags and other content as well as new privacy changes that allow them to decide if they want to be tagged in a photo or a post.
Facebook’s latest changes bring it fully up to date in terms of controls that newly arrived rival Google+ has with its Circles capability.
And it appears Facebook is endeavouring to avoid the mistakes it made in the past by trying to better communicate changes to its privacy rules and what better way than to bring privacy settings right to the front and in the moment the user is posting something.
Time will tell if these new settings will function smoothly to provide users with greater control over their online persona and privacy or if they will prove difficult and complicated.
