First Internet Blog- latest industry blog

The information society is even more relevant today, we are constantly accessing web design on the move through our internet-enabled phones. Will we depend more on local search? Perhaps.. however when we are out and about, our search behaviour is different to searching on a desktop as we need access to information quickly. Whether it be a specific location, directions to a restaurant, bar or shop.

The new Google Maps version released this month has enabled cyclists to find their way using mobile search. I believe this will be an invaluable tool for any cyclist who gets lost in the countryside.

Mobile search is also used to compare prices on the high street. We are time poor and this can save us time by cutting out walking from shop to shop.

Amazon and eBay have certainly taken note of mobile search by creating ’search, shop and buy’ and an iPhone app.

What is your most popular mobile search?

Here at First Internet, we watch trends in web design and online with an almost obsessive interest; we – along with the rest of the online world – were excited by the meteoric rise of social media and we waited with baited breath for news of Google’s ‘next big thing’. Therefore, the fact that online television has – as yet – failed to make a significant impact on the world has not escaped us, but why?

With BT cashing in with their i-player service and ITV and Channel 4 launching similar propositions, internet protocol television (IPTV) is one of the sector’s hottest topics. Yet, paradoxically, it is also perhaps one of the least understood and under-used. While the UK was ahead of the game, launching its first IPTV service way back in 2003, its growth has been at best marginal and at worse stunted.

One of the main reasons for this is that the UK’s TV industry were not sure about what opportunities IPTV offered to advertisers and many questions were raised about how appropriate traditional advertising models would be in this new medium.

However, while there remains – for the moment at least – a mainstream audience for whom any form of advertising is an unwanted invasion, there is still a wealth of opportunity in IPTV ,as any advertiser who is willing to be creative in the medium will see.

From the SmartPhone revolution, m-ecommerce, the way in which people access the internet is changing. Nowhere can this trend be more clearly identified than when you look at the first day of sales for Apple’s iPad.

Apple managed to sell an impressive 300,000 iPad’s on the first day of launch in the US, although this wasn’t quite as high as the sales of the iPhone, which topped half a million.

More than one million applications were also downloaded from the app store on the launch date, with over 250,000 ebooks purchased from the iBookstore. But what does this mean for the future of web design?

Well just as the launch of the iPhone completely revolutionised the mobile phone sector, the launch of the iPad will completely change what consumer demands from a brand’s website.

Web designers will have to respond quickly and strategically to the changing landscape of web design or risk getting left behind . . .

The debates are over, the tireless political campaigning has stopped and the votes are in. But in terms of who won the ‘Digital Election’ the jury is still out.

This election will go down in history as the most ‘digital’ we have ever seen. Politicians – and bizarrely their wives – took to Twitter to communicate their policies, social media sites such as FaceBook were mobilized to gage voters opinions and it seemed as though almost everyone was taking to the blogosphere to give their two pennies worth.

But who will go down in history as the true digital hero of the 2010 election? Gordon Brown with his outdated blog? The Tories with their ill-conceived i-phone app? No, The Electoral Commission is the true digital hero of this election.

Regardless of the masses of negative press they have received since election night, the Electoral Commission utilised all digital platforms strategically and confidently in an attempt to redress one of the biggest political challenges this country faces – voter apathy.

Unlike Gordon et al who blindly used social media in the most untargeted and unsuccessful way, The Electoral Commission’s digital campaign was targeted and added value to a user’s online experience. Which – ultimately – is what online advertising is all about.

Christmas 2010 will go down in history as the time when all retailers realised they could no longer afford to ignore online. As the high street struggled with spiralling market conditions and dwindling consumer confidence, online retailers enjoyed record sales and an increase in the number of people buying online.

Recent figures from the IAB revealed that one in ten people do all their shopping online, while over 67% consumers say that they go online to shop at least twice a week. Another report, conducted by online consumer watchdog, ‘Think Tank’ found that the majority of people would prefer to buy from a brand that had a website.

The evidence speaks for itself, for businesses to survive the current market conditions; they must have an online presence.

Today, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have become the first nations able to use Arabic characters for entire web addresses. The system was activated yesterday by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) and also enables web addresses to be written from right to left. Despite some websites enabling native scripts to be used minimally, this is the first time that the country codes no longer need to be typed in Latin characters. For example, Egypt will no longer be written as .eg but in Arabic characters. The Egyptian Ministry of Communication is one of the first websites to have a domain name written entirely in Arabic.

Rod Beckstrom, the president of Icann, has described the accomplishment as “historic.” This has opened up the potential for languages, such as Russian, Chinese and Thai to have the same progression made with web addresses. Some countries, such as China have already constructed workarounds to enable users to access websites using their native languages, but these are not internationally recognised and cannot be used on all computers. More than 20 countries have requested to have international domains. Arabic speakers; who may not have used the internet up until now, will have the world of cyber space opened up to them because of this development.

Icann have described this as the most significant change since the creation of the internet 40 years ago as more than 50% of internet users do not use the Latin script. Web address owners in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates can now request domain names to be in their country codes.