Media

HONG KONG - Sherman Wu has joined OOH advertising company JCDecaux Transport as its new marketing director on 29 May, replacing Peggy Jor, who left the company after three years and moved to Weekend Weekly on 3 June.

HONG KONG - Turner International Asia-Pacific has announced that it will be reducing its Asia-Pacific workforce by about 30 per cent.

GLOBAL - Japanese multinational Sony has chosen WPP’s GroupM agencies to handle media for its mobile and electronics business.

GLOBAL - Japanese multinational Sony has chosen Mediacom to handle media for its mobile and electronics business.

The business networking site's home page is replaced by a domain sales page for about an hour.

Opera Commerce, a fully owned subsidiary of the browser maker Opera has partnered with the Mobile games company Nazara Technologies, to deploy Opera’s payment exchange (OPX) for Opera Mini users. While the deal period or the terms of the agreement were not disclosed, Opera informed that Nazara will be deploying Opera’s payment exchange (OPX) to simplify mobile payments options like operator billing for Opera Mini users in India, Africa, the Middle East and Europe to purchase mobile games. Note that Nazara will be still managing the billing of these games and Opera’s role in this partnership will be limited to help Nazara offer an improved payment mechanism to its users on Opera Mini and help increase conversions for Nazara by routing failed transactions through OPX. Speaking to Medianama, Sunil Kamath, Vice President For South Asia, Opera told this partnership will allow Nazara to simplify the process of requesting user information like the user’s MSISDN number for verifying purchases from Opera Mini users and also monetize their Opera Mini traffic, thereby creating an additional revenue channel for the company. However, he noted that operators play only a passive role in OPX and content partners (in this case Nazara) should have a prior partnership with operators before seeking user information through OPX. Also, this process happens entirely behind the scenes, invisible to the end user. Kamath also hinted that Nazara partnership is the first among many such partnerships in the future but didn’t disclose any specific details on this. Launched in February 2012, Opera Payment Exchange aims to be a platform between content providers, digital payment gateways, operators and end users. Content providers can use this platform to promote their content and provide an improved payment experience to Opera Mini users, while for payment providers it removes the possibilities of false clicking and billing from users (which has declined over time but is still quite rampant in the current VAS system). In return, Opera will get advertising revenues from content providers who intend to promote content to Opera Mini users through ads on the browser. Remember, Opera Mini still leads the mobile browser market in India, although UCWeb’s UCBrowser is apparently catching up with Opera Mini. Last month, a TOI report had suggested that Opera Mini has 30% market share of mobile browsers in India, while UC Browser has 27% market share in the country. Opera had stopped divulging India specific user base numbers a while back, but it claims to have 225 million users (pdf) as of April 2013 and last June, Opera had mentioned that India was the largest market for Opera Mini. We are not sure if there has been any changes at the top or India continues to be the largest market for Opera Mini right now.

The redesigned Google Maps comes with a handy virtual tour to acquaint users with what’s changed. That’s hardly revolutionary, but in a very nice bit of user experience engineering, the tour has some extra smarts built in. If, like me, upon first getting access to this new version you immediately start poking around and trying out various searches and only click on the tour option later, the tour’s messaging will cleverly acknowledge that state: Messing about with a new product unguided is a completely natural first use case for just about any product, and my guess is almost everybody does this. So creating a corresponding behavior for this tour makes perfect sense. Instead of assuming that the tour will commence with the product in its virgin state, this opening message says “It looks like you’ve already started exploring the new Google Maps!” and guides the user from there. This took a little bit of extra design and engineering, and the end result does not make or break the product. But to me, it’s significant in that it clearly signals how much thought and care the product team has invested into the app. That’s worth loads. If you don’t already have access to the new version, you can request access at the preview site, or read Google’s announcement from last month. To follow me on Twitter click here.

The social browser creates a unique Android app that introduces navigation for bigger screens and "elevator buttons" for improved scrolling.

An initiative offers creative and effective public service announcements for inspiration.

Sometimes, cease-and-desist letters are mere morsels of intimidation, their legal grounds swamps. One lawyer decided that the accuser, West Orange, N.J., itself needed to shut up and go away. His letter smacks of literary genius. Originally posted at Technically Incorrect