media

Do you know you're going to die one day? I remind myself of this every morning. Not for a depressed, self loathing, teenage angst kinda way. It's to push myself to get things done while I can.

My new years resolution was to stop using my phone while walking. My main two reasons for this are -

1) I hate the inconsiderate people (I previously included myself in this group) who slow down or even stop walking while on their phone in front of me. Nothing is that important you have to be staring at your phone that intensely, if it was, you wouldn't have forgotten about it or left it to last minute.

You might say “but I needed to check Google maps for directions”, but you could have moved to one side and not walked into oncoming people, or slowed down the people behind.

As you may know, Social Media Week London will be returning to your streets in September 2013, however if you can’t quite wait that long then why not be a part of Social Media Week NYC in February where Chinwag will be joined by some great companies for a Digital Mission trip to New York.

SMW NYC looks set to be a great week with its global theme of Open & Connected: Principles for a Collaborative World being explored by speakers including Ben Kaufman, founder & CEO of Quirky, Cindy Gallop and the MakeLoveNotPorn.tv team, and Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit.

Back in December we announced the first set of companies that will be joining us for the Digital Mission to New York in February this year. 

We are very excited to not only let you know the next lucky group of companies coming along on the trip, but also to let you take a sneaky peak at the mission agenda. 

With an investor roundtable, masterclass in doing business in the USA, a traditional British pub quiz as well as all the keynotes, showcases and presentations that are being held as part of Social Media Week NYC the mission companies are not going to be short on events to go to and people to meet. You can take a look at the full agenda for the week here.

2012 has been an exceptional year for web video, with Psy's taking the world by storm and Felix Baumgartner's huge leap from space.

With record-breaking numbers of viewers watching content online, video has also played a massive part in the growth of companies globally.

Just take a look at YouTube's statistics to see how mind boggling the 'video revolution' has become, for example: 500 years of YouTube videos are watched every day on Facebook. Crazy!

We've pulled together a few interesting statistics from the past 12 months to sum up how web video has also been impacting on businesses.

What a bizarre couple of weeks for the image conscious, or at least the photographically-minded, first Instagram severs it's close ties with Twitter, then ratchets up user anger with a dramatic changes in its terms, enabling it to sell users' photos.

Meanwhile, over at Flickr, the once beloved haunt of pictures the product development wheels have cranked into high gear with numerous updates including a well-received and surprisingly snazzy mobile app.

In the latest social media battle, Instagram has switched off their integration with 'Twitter Cards', the app used to display multimedia within tweets - meaning we're no longer treated to twitterfeeds enhanced by beautiful photography (albeit mostly of cats and food).

So why the move back to 140 characters, a link and strangely cropped images? Speaking at Le Web '12 last week, Kevin Systrom, Instagram's founder and CEO, said the decision was "an evolution of where we want links to our content to go."