There’s no getting away from it: web publishers, digital agencies and even freelancing journalists wanting to add some vivid digital imagery to their article writing efforts face a stressful struggle. The content has either got to be freely available à la creative commons, or they have to sign a licence agreement with a professional digital media clearinghouse, which can take days to process. This is tough if you need the content right away because you’re covering highly topical or fast-moving events; however, a rather clever tech firm based in Finchley has come with what seems like a perfect solution: meet user content marketplace, Lobster.

How times change... Just a year or two ago, we were being told that the fight against terrorism justified mass data surveillance.

The steady consumer march toward internet TV seems to have faltered this week, with shares in video streaming service Netflix plunging by a quarter during after-hours US trading following a warning from the company that its subscriber numbers had grown less vigorously than expected.

Google’s new “Knowledge Vault” might have begun as a whimper (a quiet announcement in a talk by Google’s Kevin Murphy at the CIKM Conference last October), but it might be about to make a large bang.

With news last week that the bastion of conservative tradition, the Telegraph Media Group (TMG), was accelerating its transition from a print-focussed to a digitally led approach, there can be few doubts in even the most sceptical of minds that the digital revolution isn’t just a prospect; it’s already happened.

There’s a big secret about social media marketing: a lot of big brands are getting it wrong. They’re spending a fortune on paid likes and followers but it’s not turning into measurable ROI. Social media is a people-to-people medium. Brand-to-people doesn’t work.

There’s no doubting it; mobile messaging apps are proliferating; however, because they’re all different and not everyone uses the same one, cross-communication is a big problem. Until Frankly 3.0, that is, which is the latest version of an app that conveys ephemeral text messages AND sends them to non-Frankly users.

We like to keep our eyes and ears open here for new hardware platforms or gadgets that have the potential to change to way content is created, and while the emphasis is often on content writing or video production, today we’re focusing on music. Or rather, musicians: thanks to a new platform called Cypherr, they have an exciting new toy at their disposal that will help them network with fellow music industry professionals, upload their own music and submit it to management or executives, create and share musical content and even schedule local tours.

Google, it seems, has sent ripples of incipient panic through the global fund management sector after commissioning research on how it could enter the asset management industry.