Thursday, January 31, 2013

BrandTags Express Edition #22 :: Tennis Grand Slam Courts

First grand slam of this season, The Australian Open concluded a few days back. Unlike the 2012 encounter between Njokovic and Nadal, the final’s playoff between Njokovic and Murray became one sided after the 2nd set leading to Joker winning comfortably at the end.

One of the interesting aspects of the Grand Slams is the type of court in which they are played. Each of the four Grand Slams Australian Open, French Open, Wimbledon and US Open are played on different type of surfaces which add to the excitement of this sport. 

Both Australian Open and US Open are played on Hard Court. Australian Open is played on the Synthetic hard court whereas the US Open is played on the Acrylic Hard Court.

French Open is the only grand slam which is played on Clay Court.

Wimbledon, the second grand slam in Europe, is played on the Grass Court.

The recently completed Australian Open is also known as the Grand Slam of the Asia Pacific. The logo of Australian Open is below:


Wednesday, January 23, 2013

BrandTags Express Edition # 21 :: Twitter

In this edition, we are going to see something about the de facto standard in Social Networking - Twitter - The SMS of the Internet. 

Twitter, as we all know, is a real time information network providing one with almost everything which is happening around. Be it latest stories, upcoming movies, Hollywood gossips, Twitter is one place for all the information you ever need. 

Tweets is what makes up the Twitter. Tweets are 140 character long sentences which people use to describe events, happenings, news, stories or just anything. One can follow, have followers or just browse through the tweets and get to know "The Breaking News" within seconds of it actually happening. 

Twitter is a brain child of Jack Dorsey, who belonged to Odeo Corp which now exists as Obvious Corp. Version 0.1 of Twitter was written by Dorsey with Noah Glass on March 31, 2006. It debuted as Twttr similar to the 5 letter American short code for SMS. 

There have been several records on Twitter for the number of tweets per second for a particular event or a piece of news. The current record as of January 1, 2013, was set by all citizens of the Japan Standard Time Zone as the new year began, reaching a record of 33,388 tweets per second beating the previous record of 25,088, also set by Japan after a television screening of the movie "Castle in the Sky". 

The current logo of twitter just spots the "Twitter Bird" replacing the Larry Bird logo which existed until June 2012. The Bird is the sole branding of Twitter on the web. Douglas Bowman is considered to be the designer of Twitter. The current Twitter bird seems to be resembling the Male Mountain BlueBird.