After 1.8 million votes on a special social media website, carmaker Toyota has announced that the plural for its hybrid Prius car is Prii. Clearly, the name competition is a debate manufactured by Toyota, which has suffered reputational damage in the past year over a series of recalls. But there are also broader lessons to [...]

Technologists sneer at newspapers as the “deadwood” industry because of its reliance on paper to produce its physical product. But until now, new technology has not managed to create a mass-market product that can help leverage the global newspaper industry off its reliance on the printed page and halt its genteel decline. The reason, quite [...]

High street fashion chains have been much slower than other business sectors to embrace the Internet over the past decade, as they feared the online marketplace could cannibalise their brick and mortar presence, without adding value of its own. But this sentiment appears to be changing as the world’s largest fashion chain retailer, Zara, has [...]

Geotagging is about to come of age as both Twitter and Facebook introduce it, letting users physically locate friends and contacts which makes social media services more interactive than ever. Geotagging uses data from smartphones to pinpoint a user’s location. In existing services like FourSquare and Gowalla, it lets people ‘check-in’ to bars, restaurants or [...]

Once upon a time, like in the post-War era depicted by the Mad Men TV series, clever people in marketing departments or an elegant advertising agency spent their time dreaming up catchy ways to lure consumers to their products. They created demand for things people never knew they wanted, they sliced up the market and [...]