There are countless podcasts, blogs and articles on the internet that proclaim the importance of building an irresistible brand. If you’re been reading my blog you know that branding isn’t your company name. It’s not a logo. It’s not a tag line. Branding  is a promise. It’s an expectation of an experience. Well, who delivers on this expectation? The answer is “the talent.”

So, if the brand is the talent then this completely transforms why social media should be incorporated and what it will do for you and your company. When the talent you hire or select is active on social media, engaging in two-way conversations, they can turn followers into prospects, prospects into customers, and customers into evangelists, thus growing the business into an irresistible brand.

If  you have taken the proper view and realize that the talent out there in those social spaces is the brand, then you see the impact of founders, the CEOs, or the leadership of…

Android(s goog) was everywhere I turned this past week at the 2013 International CES, running on televisions, phones, tablets and any other device that manufacturers can think of. None of the current major Android players had much to offer however, as many mobile devices running Android debuted before the show. I’d expect a few more Android product announcements in the coming weeks; perhaps at next month’s Mobile World Congress.

Huawei was on hand to show off it latest wares, including the 6.1-inch Ascend Mate. While the large screen looked fine with its 1280 x 720 resolution, I think that display is large enough for Huawei to push the envelope into higher resolution. That would also push this phone into offering a more tablet-like experience. The Mate uses Huawei’s own processor design and the company said this week that its next chip will have 8 cores.

Vizio is another company…

Early Monday morning two separate reports were published claiming that Apple (s aapl) had cut orders from iPhone parts suppliers in half, due to weaker-than-expected demand from consumers. Japan’s Nikkei said that orders had been placed initially anticipating sales of around 65 million iPhones for the company’s second fiscal quarter of 2013. A similar report regarding display manufacturers’ orders being halved was reported by the Wall Street Journal, but did not contain specific numbers. Some investors appear to be jarred by the report, and Apple stock briefly dipped below the mostly arbitrary $500 mark early Monday.

While a 50 percent cut in demand does sound big, it’s useful to keep things in perspective with regard to Apple’s normal seasonal iPhone selling trends for the second quarter. As Wells Fargo analyst and Apple watcher Maynard Um wrote in a note to clients Monday:

65 million is an awfully big number. We…

Canonical announced a version of Ubuntu for smartphones on Wednesday, showing of the software on a Galaxy Nexus(s goog) handset. The company is mostly known for its user-friendly Linux desktop operating system: Ubuntu is among the most popular Linux distributions and some hardware makers have sold computers with Ubuntu instead of Microsoft Windows(s msft). Canonical expects actual phones running Ubuntu near the end of 2013 although a build for some smartphones, such as the Nexus, will become available in a few weeks.

Based on press videos I’ve seen so far, Ubuntu on a phone looks as polished as iOS(s aapl) and open as Android(s goog), which could make for an attractive combination. The platform doesn’t require a hardware button for the home screen or task switching. Instead, users swipe from the edge of the phone display for in app navigation, settings and the home screen. Web and native apps will…

After a growing through a string of acquisitions and mergers, ride-sharing leader Zipcar (s zip) is now the company being acquired. Car rental giant Avis Budget Group (s car) said it is buying Zipcar for $500 million in cash or $12.25 per share, a 49 percent premium over Zipcar’s share price on Dec. 31.

The deal, which is expected to close in Spring 2013, allows Avis to get into the growing car-sharing market and gives Zipcar a big backer, which can help it grow and make it more efficient. Avis said it can achieve annual cost savings of $50 to $70 million for Zipcar by relying on its expertise in fleet procurement, operations and maintenance as well by increasing fleet utilization between the two companies.

For example, Avis can provide extra cars to Zipcar on the weekends when supply is constrained. Avis said it expects the deal will be accretive by the…

Amazon Web Services (s amzn) has issued a a postmortem of its Christmas Eve cloud computing outage that took many services — most notably Netflix (s nflx) — offline for a portion of the night. The cause, according to AWS: A developer accidentally deleted Elastic Load Balancer state data in Amazon’s US-East region that the service’s control plane needs in order to manage load balancers in that region.

All told, the outage (which began at 12:24 p.m. PT) lasted 23 hours and 41 minutes and, at its peak, crippled 6.8 percent of load balancers in the region while leaving others running — albeit unable to scale or be modified by users. The Elastic Load Balancer team didn’t realize the root cause of the problem for several hours, at which point it began the challenging process of attempting to restore the state data to a point in time just before its…

With it being New Year’s Eve, it’s a great time to reflect on life and plan for the new year. Allen Nance sent out a great tweet earlier today that describes an awesome approach to life:

https://twitter.com/AllenNance/status/285748293743550466

The life to do list:

• Dream Big
• Work Hard
• Learn Constantly
• Enjoy Life

Happy New Year!

After beginning in late 2007, the age of netbooks is coming to close. Acer and Asus, the two remaining top-tier manufacturers of the small laptops, are ceasing netbook production today, reports The Guardian’s Charles Arthur. For a computing market that appeared to have unstoppable growth early on, the rise and fall of netbooks happened quickly. It should remind us that disruptive new technologies can quickly erode a product’s market share, and even, the viability of a product class itself.

An example of this change can be seen in one of my most-read posts ever here on GigaOM. Out of more than 7,500 posts I’ve written, one of my most viewed is “A quick guide to netbooks” from September 2008. No matter what news was hitting the tech cycle, this post on netbooks kept finding its way in front of readers who searched for netbook information on the web. Even…

This holiday season appears to have created the conditions for another uplift in the digital content market.

Ebook spike

In ebooks, one publisher, Hachette UK, saw 86 percent more global ebooks sales this Christmas Day and Boxing Day than in 2011.

The publisher’s digital head George Walkley tells The Bookseller higher ereader and tablet sales, price promotion and greater digital availability lifted the market, including the long tail: “This is not just a frontlist phenomenon as over 6,500 of our titles saw digital sales in the last two days.”

The growth coincides with new Pew Internet data showing the proportion of Americans who read ebooks to increased 23 percent in 2012, from 16 percent a year ago.

Some independent authors using Kindle Direct Publishing reported far more modest upticks to their already small-scale sales. Their titles are relatively unknown and don’t benefit from bigger-hitting marketing campaigns of the kind that…

Apple’s Pages(s AAPL) app is my current go-to app for writing. This is mainly because of the ease of using Documents in the Cloud to transfer files between my mobile devices and desktop. My day job and freelance writing business are segregated (day job is on an encrypted laptop). Therefore, for my non-day job needs, I don’t need the full might and power of Microsoft Word(s MSFT). That said, Pages for iOS ($9.99) has lagged so far behind even the OS X version of Pages, I’m thankful that for the most part, I’m just using it to write articles and short stories. While Apple has recently made some changes to its iWork suite of apps for iOS, some of the improvements are only half-way implemented.

Change Tracking

The chief problem for me was that Pages did not show any sort of change tracking, making the app useless if your workflow…

We kinda wish that we didn’t have to spend the last GigaOM Podcast of 2012 talking about Instagram(s FB) again, but they went and changed their terms of service, throwing the internet into a tizzy, so Eliza Kern helps us sort through who’s selling whose filtered photos. Then Janko Roettgers talks to us about Netflix(s NFLX) encoding its movies 120 times as well as Redbox’s streaming service. And finally, Ki Mae Heussner gives us some tips on how to find the right co-working spot.

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As Research in Motion (s rimm) prepares for a big quarter with the January launch of BlackBerry 10, it’s trying to squeeze as much money as possible out of its operation, which it plans to use to help get its new platform off the ground. That was the big theme on RIM’s third quarter earnings call Thursday, in which it posted revenue of $2.7 billion with an adjusted net loss of $114 million or $0.22 cents per share, beating analyst expectations of $2.66 billion in revenue with adjusted loss per share of $0.36.

The results are down from the same period a year earlier when RIM reported revenue of $5.2 billion with adjusted income of $667 million or $1.27 per share diluted. The company shipped 6.9 million BlackBerry smartphones and 255,000 Playbook tablets in the latest quarter, also a steep drop off from the last year when RIM shipped 14.1 million smartphones and 150,000…

Instagram (s fb) further clarified its terms of service Thursday afternoon, noting that it would be reverting to its old terms of service language that’s been active since 2010 in regards to advertising and scrapping the updated terms released earlier this week that caused so much concern among users. However, the company had already responded to user complaints on Tuesday, clarifying that it did not intend to sell user photos or use them directly as advertisements. That post seemed to quell a good deal of user concern, so it’s unclear why the company took further steps on Thursday.

Instagram originally released the updated terms on Monday, setting off a firestorm of complaints from users who disliked the new terminology that said “a business or other entity may pay us to display your username, likeness, photos (along with any associated metadata), and/or actions you take, in connection with paid or…

The iPhone 5(s AAPL) reached nearly three dozen new countries on Friday, the most notable of those launches coming in China, where its arrival has been highly anticipated. But news video coverage of the launch at one of the country’s main Apple Store locations — Beijing — showed the newest iPhone’s debut Friday morning was not greeted with the long lines, fanfare and chaos that accompanied the launch of the iPhone 4S in January.

Before we assume that short lines on Day 1 mean that the iPhone has peaked in China, or that this bodes terribly for the iPhone 5’s success in this important market for Apple, let’s remember four things:

• Apple learned its lesson from the near-riot at the iPhone 4S launch: they implemented a system where buyers have to sign up and be approved one day in advance. It was practically designed to eliminate lines.
• It was…

Several Twitter users began noticing Sunday that they now have the ability to download their full archive of tweets, a capability that users have asked for since Twitter’s early days, but which looks like is rolling out to users now, The Next Web first reported Sunday morning. Several users were noting that they were suddenly able to click a link on their settings page to download their full archives, and a link was sent to them when the archives were ready.

Update: A Twitter spokeswoman confirmed Sunday afternoon that the company is “currently testing the ability to download your Tweets with a very small percentage of users.” She said they could not provide more information on when this will roll out more broadly.

This is a much-awaited feature that users have asked for since Twitter’s beginnings in 2006, and a functionality that sites like Facebook already offer. Longtime users…