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There was a time when it would have been hard to imagine any piece of equipment that could outdo the personal computer.  Laptops and desktop computers have become a major part of many peoples’ lives.

But now it seems the tide may be turning – that is, if the latest blog posts and news articles are true.  Apparently the sales of tablets are getting better and better, putting a dent in the growth of the PC market.  Computer sales in the United States were forecast to grow by approximately 6.7% in the last three month sales period.  In reality the growth was just 2.3%.  Some of this slow movement will undoubtedly be due to the economic situation, but this appears to be only half the story.

The most eye catching and headline making tablet of all is of course the iPad.  Certainly, Apple’s sales of their much trumpeted gadget have done exceptionally well in its first year.  When you consider its success amidst a challenging economic market, you can see that perhaps it is having a marked effect on the sale of PCs.

Only time will tell whether this trend will continue.  One would suspect it will end somewhere, since a tablet cannot do everything that a personal computer can.  But similarly a tablet has advantages that even a laptop does not, never mind a desktop.  So it can be expected that tablets will continue to garner good sales in the months to come.

Pandora, the popular music streaming service has successfully navigated the choppy waters of floatation, going public – and raising a whopping $235 million in the process. That is an awful lot of money for a company that hasn’t made a dime yet.

The public valuation puts the company at a total of $2.6 billion – which is even more money – and that’s twice as much as the company hoped for when it announced its plans back in February. Consider the planned rise in royalty costs, the fact that again the company haven’t made any money, and that is some serious investor confidence. Pandora currently expends a total of 49% of its revenues in royalties, but these are set to increase year on year until 2015, as streaming services become ever more popular. Major labels like to make as much money as they possibly can at all times, and they seem to have cottoned on to the paradigm shift that’s awkwardly moving across the globe.

The main difference between Internet radio and its terrestrial based counterpart is that public radio has to only spend about 10% rather than the 49% Pandora currently pay. In spite of the fact that Pandora isn’t profitable, Kurt Hanson, Internet radio vet, says that it kind of is profitable already. He says that the fact Pandora only plays about 80 seconds of advertising per hour rather than the 10-15 minutes that terrestrial radio does is definitely in the former’s favour. With logic like that, who needs economics?

Apple has announced that when iOS 5 releases this fall, it will include deep integration with Twitter, but have nothing for Facebook.  Why would Apple ignore the world’s largest social networking platform in favor of Twitter? 

I can think of two reasons: lack of terms and conflicting strategies.

The first is obvious.  Apple has been in talks with Facebook for most of this year, but so far neither company has made any announcements of headway in terms of ironing out what the two companies want to do together.  A lot of people in the industry aren’t even sure what the talks are for, really, since neither side has said anything beyond the usual corporate-speak of “to synergize..”

The second reason is strategic approach.  The two companies are on opposite sides of the field in that regard.  Facebook is all about the cloud – putting everything out there for everyone else to see.  Apple is about the individual user experience, pulling content into a device in the user’s hands.  In many ways, these two approaches are contradictory.

A good illustration of this is how content is used by a Facebook user and an iPhone user.  A photograph taken by that user and posted on Facebook becomes instantly shared with potentially tens of thousands of Facebook users.  A photo taken on an iPhone becomes sharable, yes, but also can be used to change a background during a specific song being played, added to a sharing app that manipulates photos, pasted as additional content in an augmented reality game, or otherwise used to enhance the iPhone user’s experience in any of thousands of ways – thanks to apps and the device itself.

While these two things aren’t mutually exclusive, their underlying corporate strategic approaches may be.   That is probably why Apple is not integrating Facebook into iOS 5.

Major newspapers like the New York Time and others have been struggling to figure out where they fit in today’s instant information society.  The old paradigm of printing news and delivering it on dead trees to people’s doorsteps is melting away and the once-giants in the industry are paddling upstream to try to preserve it.

The recent addition of a paywall to the paper’s website is proof that the management behind this news behemoth just can’t seem to understand how the Internet functions.  Many people, including myself, have stopped reading the NYT altogether and have barely missed it.  The sad truth is that many (often better, more timely) news outlets are out there and publishing online.

Some reporters at the Big Paper outlets, though, do seem to get it.  Recently, conflicts in places like Libya, disasters in Japan and Haiti, and others have shown that people with access to the Internet via their phones can do some amazing on-the-spot, real-time reporting.

The latest example is NYT reporter Brian Stelter, who was in Joplin, Missouri to witness the aftermath of a tornado touching down there.  He did it via Twitter, since he had no access to the Internet or the voice call system on his phone.  He did, however, have access to text messaging and used that to send messages to Twitter as well as post photos on his Tumblr account.

None of that happened officially through the NYT.

Of course, Twitter is no replacement for real news reporting, but this example shows that blogs, online-only news outlets, and more can produce reporting that rivals or even surpasses what is done at outlets like the NYT and their ilk.

Some old timers in the print industry have realized this and are moving away from on-the-spot news reporting and into commentary and other arenas where timeliness is no longer a factor.  The NYT, however, seems to have missed that memo and continues to struggle along as a paper-based dinosaur that just won’t acknowledge its own extinction.

Apple found themselves at the tip of an 84% increase in brand value over the past year to top Google as the world’s most valuable global brand. Google, however, dropped in brand value by 2%, but it was one of the many technology companies to overpoweringly head the standings. Tech brands made up one third of the entire top 100.

Nigel Hollis, executive VP of Millward Brown, assistant producers of the BrandZ Top 100 list, said: ‘The prevalence of technology and telecom brands in the BrandZ Top 100 reflects a continued global trend. Mobile technology is becoming increasingly important in the lives of people all around the world. Smartphones are changing the way people communicate and access content, but they are useless without the connectivity provided by the mobile infrastructure.’

The study ranks the top 100 ‘Most Valuable Global Brands’ in conjunction with Millward Brown, WPP and The Financial Times. The list includes Facebook for the first time this year, which made its debut at number 35, with the biggest increase in brand value at 246%. Meanwhile, Amazon became the world’s number 1 retail brand, up 37% from last year. They overtook Wal-Mart to place highest in the retail category.

Technology was indeed a catalyst even for other brands to maintain prominence worldwide, with companies like Burberry, Chanel and Coca-Cola utilising a wealth of social media and application products in order to remain at a level of worldwide importance.

Recently, a London based investment manager stated that social media plays an important part in investment decisions. They plan to launch a fund entirely dedicated to using Twitter to aid in the making of investment decisions. Managed by Derwent Capital Markets, the fund has become known as ‘The Twitter Hedge Fund’ among some top Wall Street insiders. The launch has been consistently delayed, but news reports suggest there has been around $100 million invested in the fund already.

The interest in using social networks for investment purposes is wide reaching throughout financial markets across the globe. However, the actual investors looking to capitalise on the tangible trend data that sites like Twitter produce aren’t your typical city suit wearing gents. Instead, they’re complex algorithms run by computers that generate data and literally buy and sell financial commodities like stocks, options and currency.

These computers need content in order to work properly- and social networks provide an excellent region-specific overview of what people are doing and wanting at any given time. Trending topics on websites like Twitter and patterns revealed in Facebook news feeds can be collated to give very specific information on the various demographics using the sites. Various estimates put the percentage of all trading in financial markets done by computers at between 46 and 73- an almighty number. The stock market quickly approaches autonomy. Is this a good thing? Let us know in the comment thread.