Welcome to Tech Talk, where we take a quick look at the technological picture in Australia, and what it means to business. Our goal is not to add to the hype, but to see through it, and give you an objective view, so that you can make decisions based on information, not sensation!

It has been another interesting month in the mobile phone world. Apple CEO Steve Jobs admitted that his company isn’t perfect in reference to the well publicised iPhone 4 issues, which was news to many Mac devotees. Meanwhile the upcoming Windows 7 Phone was previewed this month amongst speculation that every Microsoft employee would be supplied with one of their own. A few years ago Microsoft reportedly banned their employees from using iPods, I wonder if they will ban iPhones too.

Mobile Express Checkout was launched this month with creators PayPal expecting more than half a billion dollars in mobile payments and more than 5 million members regularly using PayPal over mobile devices. This highlights the growing trend of people accessing the web from mobile devices and the shift to mobile e-commerce. It doesn’t seem that long ago that people were not comfortable using credit cards over the internet.

Congratulations to Facebook who officially hit 500 million users this month. This is a great success story for social media and highlights human desire to connect and communicate online. The question is, how many users can Facebook reach? At its current rate of growth, we can expect 1 billion users by late 2012.

Google Images was revamped and recently rereleased. The changes make it easier to search the approximately 10 billion images on file with greater emphasis on usability. Google also announced the launch of Google Image Search ads, which displays the ads along the top of the page when an image search has been made. With Google Images having over a billion page views per day, it is worth considering Google image ads as part of your online advertising campaign.

During the month I presented a talk on social media to local businesses hosted by the Port Macquarie Chamber of Commerce, a copy of which can be viewed on our Facebook page. I received lots of positive feedback and it is clear there are a lot of business people out there that are aware of social media but do not know if and how they would use it for their marketing. So in this month’s column I thought I would reiterate some of the key points from the presentation and encourage all businesses to consider online and social media as part of their marketing strategy:

• Businesses are spending a greater percentage of their marketing budget on online marketing which includes websites, electronic newsletters and social media
• Online marketing is more measureable than any other marketing medium allowing you to analyse, adapt and improve your strategy
• Australian’s consume more media online compared to any other medium
• Look for a balanced marketing strategy including both traditional and online mediums
• Engage the social media environment, take part in discussions and show your brand personality. Don’t just promote your services
• Don’t be afraid to allow customer interaction on your social media sites
• You can reuse social media across multiple platforms, as long as you don’t duplicate the content across the mediums

Finally, in tune with the social media theme for this month, Joyer is giving away a Nintendo Wii to one of our Facebook fans. The winner of the Wii will be drawn on the 30th September so become a fan at facebook.com/JoyerOnline for your chance to win.