Useful Apps for today's advertising world

Here are some of the top apps for both iPhone and Android platforms that are hot favorites in the advertising agency world. We hope you'll find them useful...

DropBox

This FREE Dropbox app is very popular with agency people, and extremely useful for transfering documents – either for sharing or for when you're traveling and need to access your files on the go. Creatives absolutely love it. It lets you

• Access your Dropbox on the go.
• Sync downloaded files so they’re up-to-date.
• View your files on your iPhone or iPod Touch.
• Download files for offline viewing.
• Take photos and videos and sync them to your Dropbox.
• Share links to files in your Dropbox.
• View interactive photo galleries.

Available on the App Store and for Android  at Dropbox for Android

Evernote

Remember everything with Evernote... This fantastic app lets you create notes, snap photos, and record voice memos that you can then access any time — from your phone, computer, or the web. Features include:

• Create text, snapshot, and voice notes any time
• Snap photos of white board, business cards, or product labels and Evernote will recognize the text in the images
• Turn your on its side to scroll through an endless stream of notes.

Available on the App Store and for Android on  Evernote Apps on Google Play

Facebook

Facebook on your mobile or tablet makes it easier than ever to stay connected on the go. You can update your status numerous times day once you have Facebook in your pocket.  Facebook lets you look up maps and directions, check events and more. Have chats and group conversations, play games and share all your updates.

Available on the App Store and on Android on Facebook for Android

Scanner Pro for iPhone

ScannerPro for iPhone costs $6.99 and it's one great useful app – designed for both iPhone and iPad. It transforms your phone into  a iin-pocket scanner for when you don't have quick access to one. You can also scan multipage documents and email them or upload it to your DropBox. Scanned documents can be emailed and then printed or uploaded to Evernote, DropBox or Google Drive. And useful docs can be saved on your phone/pad.

Available on the App Store

CamScanner – Phone PDF creator for Android

The most downloaded scanning app for smartphones over the world!  More than 40 million users’ choice over the world!

Available on Google Play store for Free

TweetDeck

TweetDeck is your mobile browser for staying in touch with what's happening on Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and Buzz. TweetDeck makes it easy to stay up to date and organized no matter where you are.

Available on the App Store and for Android on Google Play

FlipBoard

This is a way cool app – Free for both iPhone and Android platforms. Flipboard is a personal news magazine filled with everything being shared across the Web, from breaking news to stories on world events, sports, travel and more. Simply pick a few topics and your Flipboard is instantly populated with the news you care about.

But it’s not just about news. Use Flipboard to flip through social networks. Add Facebook, Twitter to browse articles and photos friends are sharing. Instagram and Flickr photos are beautiful to see in your personal magazine. Now the news your friends share is easy to flip through, with headlines and excerpts that give you an immediate glimpse into everything. It’s a fun way to catch up on all your social news.

Available on the App Store and for Android on Google Play

Ad Age on mobile

Stay in touch with what's hot and what's not in the world of advertsing with this handy app from Advertising Age – featring Latest, Digital, Media and Agency news tabs. All the most recent news and views from Ad Age, the leading global source of marketing and intelligence. No fancy stuff, just up-to-the-minute news from Digital, Mediaworks, Agency News, Global News and CMO Strategy. Read it, share it, tweet it--on the go.

Note: While the Android version is available in the Middle East, we're told only US  iTunes store registrations can download the iPhone app.

Available on the App Store and for Android on Google Play

post written for mcnholding.com

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2012: Some Amazing Internet Numbers

The year 2012 was an amazing year for internet numbers. The MCN Insights Library gathered these numbers from monitoring company Royal Pingdom. Some of these numbers absolutely boggle the mind, and some of them, we’ve come to accept.

There are 2.4 billion internet users worldwide as of end-2012. And, 2.2 billion email users worldwide – of which 425 million use Gmail, making it the biggest email service around. A big new one: there were 1.3 billion smartphones in use worldwide by the end of 2012. You want to browse? There were 634 million websites (with 51 million being added to the web every year) and 246 million domain name registrations in 2012. 

Want social? Of course you know about Facebook passing 1 billion users in October as well as Twitter’s 200 million in December. But here’s more number cruching: 2.7 billion likes on Facebook every day, 175 million tweets were sent on Twitter every day, while Google’s +1 button was used a whopping 5 billion times per day. 300 million – Number of new photos added every day to Facebook.

Search? 1.2 trillion searches on Google in 2012. Surprising one? 87.8 million – Number of Tumblr blogs. And, new on the scene: 5 billion – The total number of photos uploaded to Instagram since its start, reached in September 2012.

Middle East? 90 million – Number of Internet users in the Middle East.  And Obama? 819,000+ – Number of retweets of Barack Obama’s tweet “Four more years”, the most retweets ever.

written for the MCN blogpost

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Convergence on TV. Samsung's new experience device at home

Our media agency folks keep talking about how media consumption habits are changing because of changes in devices – particularly in the hand-held domain – meaning your phone or tablet. But here's a new breakthrough TV from Samsung that combines lean-back and lean-froward habits and mashes them onto a large 60-inch LED experience at home.

According to a report on mashable, Samsung really wants to be the company to define the future of TV. And since the TV is now home to so much more than just shows, Samsung has revamped the user interface of its smart TVs  to reflect today's connected and social world.

The Smart Hub UI — the TV's "home screen" — on all Samsung TVs going forward will be defined by five app-like tiles, each of which borrows heavily from mobile user interfaces:

On TV: For live TV, this tile will display six thumbnail images that represent programs the TV recommends based on viewing patterns. There'll be a yellow progress bar underneath each to see how far each show has progressed.

Video On Demand: The place for services like Netflix and Hulu Plus. Enter a title (either via text or voice), and the TV will show you all the options you have for viewing it.

My Content: Once your TV is connected to your home network, you'll be able to see all your personal content (video, music and photo) here, across devices.

Social: Here you'll find feeds from Twitter, Facebook and other services, which you'll be able to use to quickly connect with the online conversation about what you're watching.

And here's the one that really got my interest on overdrive...

Apps: Download and run Smart TV apps (weather, stocks, et cetera) via this tile, where a recommendation engine will suggest new ones. Samsung says there are "many" video apps to choose from.

Besides organizing your connected TV content into five buckets, Samsung's Smart Hub is designed to work with the new gesture and voice controls the company debuted in 2012. For example, the On Demand tile will respond to natural language like, "I feel like a little Game of Thrones right now."

Our favorite UI feature: You can perform a thumbs-up gesture to Like something on Facebook via the Social tile.

Samsung's improving the second-screen abilities of its TVs, too, enabling them to mirror content down to other devices, including iPads and iPhones. Samsung phones and tablets can also "mirror up" content to the TV.

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