Any quick Google search tells you instantly that Barcelona, Siem Reap, Cape Town and so forth rank the highest as best cities in the world. So I guess the branding, PR and communications of these cities are getting the most positive messages across. Well done to their marketing teams. The objectives are simple, to make a city as aspirational as possible to the widest possible market. Solid communications plans are based on the obvious – what are you, what do you deliver and who are you for, who is your target market, who you’re trying to “sell” to. Furthermore, the consistency of messaging, a city hanging its proverbial hat onto whatever “hook” they decide upon and then sticking with it most often has better success. A good logo doesn’t go amiss either – a sticker of a city’s logo travels a long way.

For us, the biggest innovation in terms of media spaces has definitely been influencers. From people in their bedrooms to organised groups of collaborators and influencers turned celebrity, the influencer media space has grown exponentially in 2017, and it shows signs of speeding up in 2018.

As a trained scientist with a PhD in biochemistry, I’d been accustomed to having a direct line to the latest cutting-edge science throughout my academic career. It was only after graduating from Cambridge University that I began to notice the huge difference in accessibility to many things I had taken for granted previously: the wealth of scientific knowledge that I had been so used to accessing during my studies was no longer available to me.

“Venture investing is about building large and sustainable businesses. Our capital allows companies to grow quickly and invest more in product. A good team understand that the quality of their product is the priority, if they get this wrong they will not retain customers and they risk the whole company with a major product outage or security breach. The balance is achieved by focusing development on what really matters for early customers.”

Co-working has been the ‘It’ workplace trend for quite some time now. By the end of the new year, nearly 1.2 million people worldwide will have worked in a co-working space. Enabled by mass mobility, it’s now forcing many of us to rethink the role of the traditional office building and ask the question ‘what’s the future for the office in a co-working world?’.

In recent years, video content has risen to become a critical weapon in the engagement arsenal for digital marketers. But aside from its potential to deliver messages in a concise, memorable and emotive way – prompting increased consumer-brand engagement – video is also now emerging as an important ranking factor for SEO, with Google’s ownership of YouTube meaning (unsurprisingly) that websites incorporating high-quality video can expect a significant uptick in their organic search traffic.

Digital media businesses are having a tough time of late. Traditionally, media companies rely on advertising for their revenues. But despite total global ad sales growing for many years, today 85p in every £1 is currently going to just 2 companies in the digital ad space; Google and Facebook. Media companies are left to fight for a shrinking slice of the pie.

What does this mean for newer media companies like Culture Trip that compete in this market? And, how can they use tech to help them monetise?

As startups often are, Habito began from my own simple story of acute frustration; I bought a house and the experience was nightmarish.

My home-owning dreams weren’t being quashed by the fault of any particular individual, company or intrinsic malice working against me. It happened because important processes – like home buying – have mutated over time into complex and convoluted chains of different stakeholders, from regulators to lenders, brokers to surveyors, estate agents, buyers and sellers.

I have been in tech recruiting for the best part of 25 years now, and I can safely say it’s an industry that systemically overrates technical ability and underrates behaviour. Invariably, issues that arise within technical businesses – and, really, in any business – don’t come down to technical competence (i.e. what people know) but have everything to do with behaviour (i.e. what people do).